To see the full short, visit Deadly Serious Productions here. This Is Why Everyone Hates You contains strong language and adult content.

FEATURING: James McAvoy, Catherine McCormack, Derek Jacobi, Julian Glover (voice actors)

PLOT: Hal, Crown Prince of a kingdom of marionettes, disguises himself as a commoner to try

to uncover his father’s murderer.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Strings is essentially a stock prince-grows-to-be-a-man-and-saves-the-kingdom high fantasy tale, but with a twist: everyone in the film is not only a marionette, they know they’re a marionette. The gimmick is used meaningfully, but given the standard-issue narrative, it’s not enough to movie this film from the “offbeat curiosity” into the “weird” column.

COMMENTS: Strings‘ basic plot, which involves an undercover prince, a kingdom in peril, intrigue and betrayal, prophecies, virtuous misunderstood rebels, appeals to the “power of love,” and a big battle at the end, is at the same time a bit confusing (with lots of characters, factions and subplots to keep track of) and overly familiar. That hardly matters, however, because the movie’s real pleasures come from admiring the meticulously constructed puppets as they dance across the boldly-lit diorama sets, and even more from the film’s creation of a complete marionette culture and mythology. The hand carved puppets have an Old World, doll-like charm, and although their faces are all frozen in neutral expressions, they exhibit an unexpected range of expressiveness just by raising or lowering their eyelids or tilting their heads that make them only slightly uncanny. The filmmakers make no attempt to hide the marionettes’ strings—even going so far as to title the movie after the darn things—and this is the most interesting and curious aspect of the  production. A dozen or more strings rise up from each character’s body, disappearing into the heavens above. A breathtaking aerial view illustrates why airplane flight would be impossible in this alternate reality, as we see thousands of strings rising above the moonlit clouds stretching up to infinity, each set connected to an invisible creature walking about the world below. The film explores every aspect of their strung-up existence; even the city gates and prison cells operate according to weird marionette logic. I won’t spoil every single thread, but it was fascinating to see the mystical “birth of a marionette” scene, as the mother brings the carved wooden block of a baby to life by painfully summoning strings to descend from the heavens, then attaching them to the lifeless wooden doll. It’s tough to figure out who this movie is aimed at—it’s too dark and weird for the kiddie matinee crowd, and not quite dark and weird enough for us—but that very singularity of vision and lack of a clear marketing angle gives it cult credibility. In the end, despite the fact that we don’t make much of a connection with the archetypal heroes, despise the stock villains, or feel much investment in the restoration of the kingdom, Strings still manages to be a visually beautiful and imagination-stimulating movie. And it finishes with an unexpectedly touching ceremony that takes the marionettes’ central metaphor, alien as it is, and uses it to tug a little on our heartstrings as well as theirs.

Strings contains a couple of nods to Shakespeare: the main character who seeks to avenge his slain father, the king, while being opposed by a deceitful uncle, bears a passing resemblance to “Hamlet.” Even more obviously, the protagonist who grows from a foolish boy to a competent king is named Prince Hal, just like the star of the “Henry IV” and “Henry V” plays.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Essence of movie’s weirdness lies in its initial conceit… not quite strange enough to appeal to hardcore arthouse auds who savor the work of Jan Svankmajer, the Brothers Quay and the like, but neither is it cutesy enough to cross over to the mainstream.”–Leslie Felperin, Variety (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Teodor.” 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.)

Alas, Karloff’s swan song is not an ideal exit, even if he is the most redeemable element of Curse. That assessment is completely without nostalgic sentiment. Karloff heads a genre dream cast: Christopher Lee, Barbara Steele and Michael Gough. Stills from the film suggest a potential weird movie lover’s delight, but that potential is squandered through direction and writing that is too pedestrian to even be unintentionally bizarre.

The overall failure of the film can be attributed primarily to the unimaginative direction of Vernon Sewell. Sewell made a spattering of genre films, none of which rose above or fell below the level of mediocre. The plot, inspired by Lovecraft, is well-worn. Robert Manning (Mark Eden) is searching for his missing brother, Peter. This search leads Manning to Craxton Lodge. There, Manning encounters resistance and denial from J.D. Morley (Lee). Lee is overly familiar here in the type of sinister, square mustachioed role he played repeatedly. Although his acting is by no means unprofessional, the way his role is written, coupled with lackluster direction, leaves no opportunity for surprise.

Feigning guilt for his lack of information regarding Peter, Morley hospitably invites Manning to stay at Craxton Lodge. Manning does, partly because of amorous ambitions for Manning’s niece, Eve (Virginia Wetherell), whose wardrobe alternates between mini-skirts and see-through nighties. The film spins (wastes) a bit of time following Manning’s attempts to bed Eve (predictably, he succeeds). Meanwhile, Manning has nightmares regarding Lavina Morley (Barbara Steele) and his deceased brother. Lavina was an ancestral witch, burned at the stake, who now seeks revenge on the descendants of her persecutors. Shockingly, Manning discovers that his own ancestor was Lavina’s chief prosecutor! That sounds a bit like recycled Mario Bava for a reason. The casting of Steele is a complete wash out. She is wasted in green make-up, a low cut dress, rams’ horns, and a laughably bad echo box . It is little wonder that this film inspired her attempt to get the hell out of a genre that had degenerated into trash. The dream sequences follow a mundane S & M formula. A tasseled dominatrix whips her virginal victim, and Lavina’s henchman, in studded leather bikini briefs and Harley head gear, brands victims with the mark of Satan!  Throw in more half-naked virgins, banal color wheel lighting affects, a spinning sixties lamp which channels the dead, and some spirograph fx and juxtapose all this with scenes of late 60′s youth whittling away their lives with drugs and orgies. Obviously, such a rock-n-roll culture spawns from Old Nick himself, who is pulling the strings in the form of Lavina, exacting her revenge. If that sounds like a possibly entertaining cup (and to some it might), the disappointment inevitably comes in how lethargically it plays out.

Michael Gough is the imbecile butler, Elder,who appears sporadically to issue warnings of doom. George Zucco used to sleepwalk his way through parts like these, and Gough fares a tad better (mainly, with hammy, bushy brow antics). The one source of genuine surprise is Karloff  as Professor John Marsh. Karloff indeed looks gravely ill here. His eyes are sunken and his countenance is emaciated enough that his hat, coat, and blanket threaten to swallow him whole. He acts mostly from his wheelchair and, although he is understandably given little to do, with assistance from his “I wear my sunglasses at night” mute chauffeur manservant (Michael Warren), Karloff  injects a sense of menace into the part.

Karloff scowls with disgusted boredom over Manning’s lack of wine-tasting finesse, but the professor’s interest is perked when he discovers that the hipster is an antiques dealer. Marsh invites Manning to see his collection: instruments of torture. Karloff plays the scene with the right amount of condescension and personality, and doesn’t kill it with overplay (unlike, say, Lugosi in 1935′s The Raven).

The novelty of this being Karloff’s final film is not enough to salvage the enterprise, although the film, posthumously, retains minuscule interest as an of-its-time curio (yesterday’s trash is more tolerable than today’s trash). Villagers celebrating Independence Day, villagers playing hide-n-seek, an attempted human sacrifice, and self-immolation are inexplicable ingredients in this woefully under-developed brew. A flaming finale usually guarantees a degree of oomph, but, as with the rest of the film, this one fails to emerge from a nitric coma. The sprightliest moments are somehow produced by a terminal veteran actor trying to make his way towards the end credits.

FEATURING: Edward Hogg, Simon Farnaby, Verónica Echegui

PLOT: An agoraphobic young man remembers (or hallucinates) a trip he took across Europe

with his hard-drinking, sexually voracious, gambling-addicted pal Bunny.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s a mildly surreal comedy that’s in the weird ballpark, but it’s not nearly unhinged enough to make the List on weirdness alone, and too uneven to be counted among the best weird movies ever made.

COMMENTS: Bunny and the Bull begins by introducing us to Stephen Turnbull, an shut-in with severe OCD issues who files his used dental floss and checks the pH of his urine every morning, then shows in flashback how he degenerated from a functioning neurotic to a full-fledged basket case.  An emergency involving rats violating his boxes of hermetically sealed vegetarian lasagna forces him to phone Captain Crab for a takeout meal, unlocking a flood of memories.  The logo on the takeout box inspires Stephen to remember the time he was stood up by a girl he intended to propose to at a Captain Crab.  In the movie’s first anstract sequence, he imagines a restaurant constructed entirely out of painted paper; even the fish swimming in the aquarium are cardboard cutouts.  The motif carries over in the next scene, where an entire horse race is re-enacted with similar animated, spray-painted two-dimensional figures.  These two scenes set up the expectation that the entire movie will carry through this hazy-dream-version-of-a-high-school-play look, but as Stephen and Bunny begin their tour of Europe, subsequent sequences are shot on realistic looking sets, though sometimes employing blurry rear-projection or other random visual trickery.  Then, halfway through the movie the cinematographer pulls out a new look: a world full of gleaming brass CGI clockwork contraptions.  The different visual signatures each look great on their own, but the schizophrenic hopping about from one to another makes you wonder if they switched art directors halfway through film, then ran out of money in the special effects budget.  Bunny‘s visuals are frequently likened to those of The Science of Sleep, but that comparison only holds for the cardboard-cutout scenes; the lack of a consistent look for the whole film diminishes its visual impact.  As a comedy, Bunny is general a pleasant affair, although there’s one grossout digression involving a homeless Russian man who raises dogs as livestock.  But it’s not wall-to-wall belly laughs; the mismatched buddy/love triangle plot doesn’t pay off comedically the way it should.  I suspect your overall reaction to the film depends on how you view the character of Bunny.  The movie asks you to see him as a lovable rogue whose drinking, gambling and womanizing are endearing, but to my mind Simon Farnaby doesn’t bring the character across that way.  We know that Bunny funds the European road trip, but other than that the movie doesn’t give us a tremendous amount of evidence that this girlfriend-stealing, troublemaking, bear-pilfering bloke is a very good friend to Stephen.  Rather, he comes across as an obnoxious, irresponsible lout who hangs out with the timid Stephen because no one else can tolerate his company.  (Bunny’s irresistibilty to women is another puzzling bit of scripting—maybe if he trimmed up that giant mop of blond hair I could see it…)  At any rate, if you can’t bring yourself to see Bunny as a charming chum, the emotional impact of the ending is muted.  Still, Bunny boasts a number of successes, from its visual triumphs (the mechanical bull made of gears and scrap metal with butcher knives for horns) to moments of inspired comedy (a Captain Crab waitress dressed as a lobster, breaking up with her boyfriend in the middle of taking an order).  And there’s scattered imaginative weirdness to keep you watching: the unreal sets, Stephen hallucinating that characters from the flashback appear in his apartment to comment on the story, and the awkwardly creepy and easily-offended Russian dog herder.  Bunny and the Bull didn’t captivate me with its characters, or make up for that deficiency with loads of laughs, but it’s a movie with a lot of imagination and a basically good heart; I can see how others would respond positively.

Writer/director Paul King is best known for the absurd British comedy series “The Mighty Boosh.”  “Boosh” stars Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt appear in Bunny and the Bull in small roles (Barratt as the Russian and Fielding as an “expert” matador).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Director Paul King brings his talent for the surreal to the big screen… worth a watch if you fancy something different and an astounding film to look at.”–Alex Zane, The Sun (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Infinity Starr,” who called the movie “a mixture of the movie Amélie and the TV show ‘The Mighty Boosh’ with a dash of The Science of Sleep” and added “if you do not know what I am talking about in either of my references than that would truly be WEIRD.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Manjinder Virk, Christine Bottomley, Natalie Gavin

PLOT:  A quasi-documentary about the short life of Yorkshire playwright Andrea Dunbar, the

impoverished housing estate she called home, and the troubled family she left behind, told with actors lip-synching to tape recordings of real-life individuals.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Arbor is built around an unusual, film-length gimmick.  The movie itself, however, is a straightforward telling of Dunbar’s life. The story is surprising, but all too believable in its depiction of circumstances impossible to overcome.

COMMENTS: Andrea Dunbar was 15 when she began writing a play about her life in a working-class slum. The play, called The Arbor, was eventually discovered and produced by the prestigious Royal Court Theater.  Her next play, Rita, Sue and Bob Too! was successful enough to be made into a film, and it seemed she had the makings of a great theatrical career.  But Dunbar was something of a screw-up.  Probably alcoholic, she was careless with relationships and had three children by three different fathers.  Ultimately, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage while out drinking in her favorite pub at the age of 29.

This biography would be interesting enough, but The Arbor has a trick up its sleeve: director Barnard recorded interviews with Andrea Dunbar’s family and friends, and then cast actors to lip-synch those interviews, literally mouthing every word, stutter, and vocal tic.  It sounds like a stunt, but this technique gives Barnard a level of freedom unprecedented in documentary filmmaking.  Rather than a series of talking heads narrating unseen events, Barnard is able to place her actors in tableaux that reflect the accounts provided by the authentic voices.  In one early scene, recalling a fire set by one of Dunbar’s daughters, two adult actors stand side-by-side in the burning room, delivering contradictory recollections of the people they portray in a way the two real women never could.

It’s a daring convention, and sometimes a distracting one. A title card announces the technique at the start, and it’s almost impossible to forget as you watch each actor’s lips and try to get your head around the idea that they are channeling someone else’s voice.  Barnard seems to welcome the disorientation.  Consider that one of the actors (George Costigan, playing one of Dunbar’s occasional boyfriends) was also one of the stars of the movie of Rita, Sue and Bob Too!  Blurring reality seems to be the goal.  Add to that the fact that scenes are filmed in actual locations, including the pub where Dunbar died, and the line between reality and fiction is almost completely obscured.

Perhaps an even more clever touch is the staging of scenes from the play The Arbor on the streets of the Buttershaw Estate where the playwright grew up.  Even more than the archival footage of Dunbar from over 25 years ago, her play brings the world of late 70s working-class England to life, and the contrast with today reveals the community to be a gravity well of misery from which no one seems able to escape.  Plus, it’s immediately clear how thinly-disguised Dunbar’s characters are.  She, too, kept reality at a close remove.

The word “harrowing” is almost cliché in stories like this, but it’s hard to think of a better one as we learn the awful fate of Dubar’s daughter Lorraine.  An alien in her own family (half-Pakistani, she is scorned by the community, and possibly even by her own mother), Lorraine has resentment to spare.  However, it becomes clear that she has made even worse life choices than her mother, culminating in an unspeakable personal tragedy.  Here is where the gimmick works best, as the deadened voice of the real Lorraine Dunbar mixes with the sad eyes of actress Manjinder Virk to create the perfect blend of lament and hopelessness.

Ultimately, The Arbor is a bold attempt to do something new with the documentary format, to find a visually compelling way to tell a true story.  The lens we view the story through is an odd one, but the film’s real power is an all-too-familiar story of people in desperate circumstances.  Dunbar got a little closer to making her way out, but the outcome is heartbreakingly familiar.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The disconcerting effect of the lip-syncing becomes exacerbated as Barnard surrealistically positions her subjects within their own descriptions of the past…The resulting eeriness combines identification with the characters and a Brechtian removal from them, establishing the mystery of the director’s intent.”–Eric Kohn, INDIEWire (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Voices of Ewan McGregor, Timothy Spall, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant

PLOT: British farmers unite with Churchill and Scotsmen to repel Nazis who invade London by

tunneling under the English Channel.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The idea of an absurd Nazi invasion of England acted out by children’s toys is odd and appealing, but the premise is undercooked, and never hits either the weird or (more importantly) the comic notes that it should.

COMMENTS: Hitler in a dress!  That should be funny, right?  It could be either a great punchline, or the beginning of a running series of gags that see (for example) der Führer more concerned with what’s going on with his hemlines than with developments on the front lines.  But Hitler’s transvestite cameo is emblematic of the problem with Jackboots.  The joke is never developed; the movie just trots out the dictator dressed as the Queen of England, with a pearl-handled Luger, and expects us to laugh.  Although the occasional amusing one-liner slips through the fog of war (usually delivered by Timothy Spall in his dead-on Churchill impression), for the most part Jackboots‘ quips don’t exactly stomp on your funny bone.  They’re sparse, as well.  A lot of time is devoted to chuckle-free dramatic scenes between big-handed farmhand turned soldier Chris (McGregor), his lady-love Daisy (Pike), and her disapproving Vicar father (Grant), as well as to intricate battles between plastic Panzers and Punjabi guards that—considering they’re enacted with toy tanks fighting Ken dolls in turbans—are more thrilling than expected.  Jackboots is part WWII movie parody (with a roughneck American pilot who thinks the Nazis are Commies), part clever historical references (the defeated Brits retreat to Hadrian’s Wall, and the Germans are fearful of pursuing where even the Romans dared not go), and part pure silliness (a Braveheart spoof takes up a large part of the last act).  There is a running undercurrent of mock-prejudice against the Scottish (who are depicted as cannibals in skirts) that must be funnier to U.K. residents than to those in the U.S. and elsewhere—at least, I hope it is; otherwise, it’s just another Jackboots comic misfire.  The movie manages to be unique without ever finding its own voice, which makes it interesting without ever being engaging.  Mainstreamers hoping for a script with the sly gross-out humor of Team America or the pop-culture savvy of TV’s “Robot Chicken” (which uses the same action-figure aesthetic as Jackboots) will be disappointed, if not angry and frustrated, by the oblique comedy on display here.  But even if it’s not riotously funny, little touches like a ghoulish pig-nosed Goebbels, a cat who looks like Hitler, puppet gore, and an attack vanguard of bazooka-wielding Nazi dominatrices in black lipstick should be enough to keep weirdophiles watching to the end.

Though the end result is mediocre, Jackboots‘ crazy synopsis managed to attract top-notch cult British acting talent.  Besides McGregor, Pike, Spall and Grant, the voiceover cast includes Alan Cumming (as Hitler), Tom Wilkinson (as Goebbels), and Richard O’Brien (as Himmler).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…for sheer oddity value… must rank as some kind of collector’s item.”–Henry Fitzherbert, Daily Express (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Carlos Atanes

FEATURING: Marina Gatell, Ana Mayo, Paco Moreno, Ardiana Ferrer, Ignasi Vidal

PLOT: On the night before the world is to be swallowed up by a black hole, a man discovers a

world underneath his bed ruled by a chess-obsessed dominatrix queen.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Carlos Atanes is a defiantly, and proudly, surrealistic director, and his brief filmography (three features and dozens of bizarre shorts) already constitutes a body of weird work that could be worthy of recognition on this List.  With its wardrobe of black leather and chrome dental restraints along with a powerful musical score that ranges from 40s show tunes to 80s synth pop, Maximum Shame is perhaps Atanes’ most ambitious and polished—not to mention weirdest—feature work.

COMMENTS:  You have to love the tagline for Maximum Shame, which describes the movie as “an apocalyptic fetish horror musical chess sci-fi weird feature movie.”  The surprising thing is that the film, which plays like a combination of “Alice in Wonderland” and the Orpheus legend staged by refugees from a leather bar in a deserted warehouse, largely lives up to that description.  The words “apocalyptic,” fetish,” and “chess” define the three motifs that keep the film (somewhat) grounded.  The story, such as it is, takes place as a black hole is encroaching on earth (or so we are told), and characters mention the total destruction of the world sometimes as an imminent cataclysm, and sometimes as a disaster that’s already come to pass.  The film’s s&m/b&d fetishism is obvious from the costuming, most notably the deviant dental equipment used to keep slaves’ mouths perpetually splayed.  (Although the Queen plays games of dominance and submission, there is no overt sexuality in the film—which, together with its alienating weirdness, makes it of only marginal interest to the bondage crowd).  All of the characters have, or are given, the names of chess pieces, and talk of gambits and sacrificing rooks makes up a large part of the plot.  “Horror” and “sci-fi” turn out to be the least accurate of the descriptors.  The film does speak of black holes and invokes a theory of infinite parallel universes in a throwaway bid to explain the inexplicable existence of a decaying warehouse ruled by a roller-skating dominatrix under the protagonists’ bed, but, unlike Atanes’ previous feature Proxima, Shame is not hardcore (or even softcore) science fiction.  As for horror, the overall feel of Maximum Shame is disquieting, and the male and female leads both find themselves in some sort of jeopardy, but the rules of the movie’s world are too fluid and arbitrary to create a relatable terror; characters are just as likely to break into a friendly song as they are to to tie you up, insert a ball gag in your mouth and imprison you in a cardboard box.  Indeed, the film could almost as easily be called a “comedy” as a sci-fi or horror picture; there are as many absurdly funny moments as there are terrifying ones.  As far as the “musical” designation, while the score by immensely talented newcomer Marc Álvarez is eclectic and impressive—I love the bit where he has a distant xylophone shadowing Ana Mayo’s words for emphasis—there are actually only two full-fledged production numbers in the film.  Both pieces are wonderfully incongruous, like a Gilbert and Sullivan arias arising in the middle of a Cinema of Transgression atrocity.  They’re also beautifully belted out (one actress is dubbed by professional soprano Dulcinea Juárez), but there’s little to no choreography to go along with the singing—if only the ghost of Busby Berkeley had been available to give these pieces the surrealistic staging they deserved!  Of course, of the seven major tagline adjectives (we leave “feature” to one side as too obvious) “weird” is the superlative that fits the movie tighter than a slave girl’s latex corset.  If the above description hasn’t made that abundantly clear, I’ll leave you with a teaser for the movie’s “Queen of Catalan Love” sequence, in which the Queen nearly has an orgasm while receiving a foot massage and channeling the lovely British model Eleanor James on her magic mirror, but becomes confused when the image begins eating handfuls of cooked spaghetti and trans-dimensionally dripping them from her mouth onto the cement floor while upbeat New Age music straight out of a tender montage from a 1984 romantic comedy plays in the background.  The sequence is funny, erotic, and genuinely creepy all at the same time; it’s sort of the distilled essence of the shameless craziness that is Maximum Shame.

I do have one clear complaint about Maximum Shame, but it relates to the burn-to-order DVD, and not the film itself.  Although the packaging is attractive, I encountered playback annoyances.  When I inserted the disc into my Blu-ray/DVD player, it began playing automatically and immediately without going to the usual title screen.  When I brought up the DVD menu to see what I might have missed, I found a menu design with the movie title, but nothing that could be selected.  I had to eject and re-insert the disc to resume play.  When I tried to play the film on my personal computer with VLC media player, it consistently crashed.  The program could be immediately restarted, but it defaulted to that dead-end menu screen.  The movie could only be viewed by manually selecting “Title 1″ from the software’s playback menu.  On both machines, I could eventually play the movie, but the botched DVD architecture made it a hassle.  It’s possible my disc was specifically defective, but I can say that there are no special features on the DVD—and not even any standard features like individual chapter stops.  Since DVD-R’s can be changed on the fly, these problems may be addressed in the future. UPDATE: I’ve been informed the problems with the DVD-R are being looked into and should be corrected within a few days.  UPDATE 2: I’ve been informed that the DVD architecture has been fixed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Carlos Atanes has stuffed the allegorical envelope so full that very little in his down-the-rabbit-hole fantasy Maximum Shame remotely resembles anything that could be considered reality.”–Mike Everleth, BadLit.com (DVD)

DISCLOSURE: Screener copy provided for review by producer.

FEATURING:  Chris Morris, Mark Heap, Amelia Bullmore, David Cann, Julia Davis, Kevin Eldon, Roz McCutcheon

PLOT:  “Jam” was a six episode TV series that originally aired on UK TV Channel 4.  Each 25

minute episode was aired without ad breaks or credits.  The show featured various “sketches” and faux interviews dealing with suicide, murder, sexual abuse, rape, child death, and medical malpractice.  The whole thing was backed by occasionally intrusive ambient music and some segments were filmed or dubbed in an out of synch fashion that made them even more awkward and disturbing than the subject matter would suggest.

The show was repeated at a later hour as “Jaaam!”  This variation took the original sketches and remixed the visuals to make the viewing experience more tricky and surreal with shots sped up, fed through filters and replaced with stills.   Many of the sketches were born in a BBC Radio 1 very late night/early morning show called “Blue Jam” which mixed vocal skits with ambient tracks.  Some of the radio sketches were taken directly from the old soundtrack and then lip synched on TV, resulting in another layer in the onion of weird that was “Jam.”

COMMENTS:  To mix preserves, “Jam” is like Marmite: you’ll either love it or hate it.  Allow me to give you a taster.

A couple believes their young daughter is a 45 year old man trapped in a young girl’s body, so they have the genitals of a 45 year old man grafted to her body.

A woman calls a plumber to her house to fix her dead baby.  He is aghast, but she explains the baby is only 3 weeks old and they’re meant to last longer than that, and after all “it’s just pipes really.”  In a throwaway comment she reveals that the father has said he will leave if she doesn’t stop “going on about the pipes.”  An offer of £1000/hour convinces the plumber to give it a try, and later he takes her up to the bedroom to see his work.  He’s plumbed the baby’s corpse into the heating system to make it warm and added a little tap so it will gurgle.

A couple bargaining for a house negotiate a reduction in price in return for sex sessions with the seller.  When he receives a better offer, he threatens to renege on the deal, so they offer the services of the husband’s mentally disabled sister.

Some folks will have already decided that “Jam” is not for them, and I can’t really blame them.  Part of me died when I typed the words “he’s plumbed the baby’s corpse into the heating system.”  My mother would be so proud.  “Jam” is as much horror as comedy; at times, it stretches its muscles to the tearing point while pushing the envelope.  Maybe it tries too hard most of the time.  Morris repeatedly invites us to laugh at some absurdity, and then muddies the water until we no longer know what to think or how to react.  Disgust swells as laughter dies.

Take the “Baby Plumber” sketch as an example of his technique.  A dark ambient soundtrack plays throughout the whole thing, and the dialogue is delivered in a very quiet, understated way.  The sketch starts traditionally enough: a woman answers the door to a plumber who says he’s come to fix her boiler.  It could almost be a ropy porno.  Immediately she corrects him and says that it’s not the boiler, it’s her baby.  The plumber looks as nonplussed as anyone would.  As the woman explains the situation he looks by turns puzzled, disgusted, pitying.  Then she mentions the money, and his pity and disgust are gradually replaced by greed.  He doesn’t immediately jump at the offer; his moral wrestling is visible on his face at every moment.  When he takes her upstairs to see his handiwork, he is clearly revolted and proud in equal parts.  Any amusement we might have found in the initial absurd request dies as we hear the plumber detail what he has done, and we see steam rising from the out of the shot.  Then as the viewer deals with this the sketch ends with the mother leaning over the cot, talking to the baby as though he is alive, and saying she doesn’t think daddy will leave now.

There is some fine acting on display, from both performers.  And the writing subtly draws a picture of a broken woman whose baby has died and whose marriage is collapsing as a result.  The plumber isn’t a bad man, he pities the woman, is horrified by her request, but he’s weak and venal and £1000/hr is a lot of money.

But is any of this funny, in any way?  Are we meant to smile, or wonder what we would do in similar circumstances?

“Jam” poses this question time and again.  We can all imagine finding the house of our dreams.  If someone offered us a substantial discount in return for sexual services, would we be wrong to consider the option?  This sketch starts out amusingly enough.  What is really funny is not the offer but how the couple reacts.  When the man thinks that the seller is just interested in his wife, he thinks it’s a great idea.  When it becomes clear that the seller is happy for the husband to perform the oral sessions, suddenly he’s not so sure.  His wife not only overcomes her own reluctance but takes grim pleasure in paying him back for his willingness to sell her services just moments before.  Smart acting tells us lots about this couple and their relationship; so far it’s amusing and thought provoking.  Then suddenly the sketch takes a detour to the very dark side.  When the wife offers the services of her mentally disabled sister-in-law, everything immediately becomes very wrong indeed.  Then we see the final shots of the confused young woman being taken into the house by the leering seller, and none of this is funny anymore.

And here’s one of the problems I have with “Jam.”  Morris clearly wants to mess with our heads.  Everything, the unconventional filming, the odd soundtrack, the bad taste, is designed to keep us off balance.  Had the “Sex For Houses” sketch occurred in a more conventional series it would have been breathtakingly shocking, but “Jam” tries so hard to shock us that after a while, particularly if you watch more than one episode at a time, your mind starts to go “meh,” just to protect itself.

Watch “Jam” and you’ll see male porn stars ejaculate to death, a man have sex with a seductive doctor while his wife struggles to give birth alone, a six-year-old girl who cleans up crime scenes, an acupuncturist who nails her clients to the table and leaves them to hang, a lonely woman so desperate for friends that she kills to keep them.  I don’t think that TV has to be safe, bland and unchallenging, and I’ve always laughed at inappropriate things, but I struggled with “Jam.”  It tries so hard that all too often the effort shows, and it reduces its own impact by screaming its bad taste in your face for twenty five minutes at a time.

Chris Morris’ work is always challenging, though.  In the UK Morris is best known for his TV work on “The Day Today,” a satirical news show shown on BBC 2 in 1994, and for his controversial current affairs satire “Brass Eye.”  He recently directed the full length film Four Lions, about a group of inept terrorists from Sheffield.

“Brass Eye,” in particular, courted controversy by tricking celebrities into lending their names to fake publicity campaigns about (for instance) a made up drug called cake, and an elephant in a German zoo that had its trunk stuck in its anus.  Morris’ masterpiece is probably the “Paedogeddon” episode of “Brass Eye,” which mocked the press and public hysteria in the UK surrounding pedophilia.  This is an excellent piece of work and if you can find the DVD of “Brass Eye” I wholeheartedly recommend it, even if some of the cultural references don’t translate.

If “Jam” were a movie rather than a TV series, it would be a List candidate;  it’s certainly unremittingly weird.  The lack of availability will probably count against it.  The DVD can still be found on some UK sites such as Play.com and is Region 0, so if folks are really keen they could get hold of a copy if they act quickly.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…most of Jam feels hideously, frighteningly wrong. But that’s what makes it so right. The word ‘genius’ gets flung around pretty casually; but if you accept that a good definition of a genius is somebody who creates something thoroughly new, utterly unlike what has gone before, then Chris Morris is a genius.”–The Independent, Thursday, 20 April 2000