DIRECTED BY: Jim Henson

FEATURING: Jennifer Connelly, David Bowie

PLOT: A dreamy teenage girl must rescue her kidnapped baby brother by journeying to the

Goblin City at the center of a bizarre labyrinth.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Despite the MC Escher-inspired set-design, the unexpected sexual tension between teenaged Connelly and fruitily-dressed goblin king Bowie, and a devout cult following, Labryinth is ultimately just too close to a mainstream Muppet fantasy to place on a List of the 366 Weirdest movies. We’ve passed over slightly stranger movies in this genre—the visually similar Henson-directed The Dark Crystal and the thematically similar Henson-produced MirrorMask—and, although I think Labyrinth is a better film than either of those, it’s difficult to justify certifying this one when its companion films don’t even get to sniff the List.

COMMENTS: In The Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland’s breasts were famously flattened out with tape so the 16-year old could play a pre-pubescent girl. Labyrinth takes a different strategy: 14-old Jennifer Connelly plays exactly her age, portraying a hormonally testy girl-woman caught at the stage where her attention starts to shift from stuffed animals to the well-stuffed pants of strutting rock stars. That shot of rising estrogen distinguishes Labyrinth from other Oz/Alice in Wonderland fairy tale variations, giving it a subtext that goes over the heads of the tots in the audience but leaves adults with additional nuggets to ponder (and no, that’s not another reference to Bowie’s stretch pants). There’s an impressive amount of imagination on display here, starting with Henson’s puppets, who reveal an almost limitless variety (each individual goblin looks like a representative of its own species) and a nearly human expressiveness (to be honest, the puppets out-act both Connelly and Bowie). The girl’s three companions—the cowardly dwarf Hoggle, the bestial Ludo, and Sir Didymus, the comic relief knight/terrier—are all worthy additions to Henson’s Muppet menagerie, and there is a zoo full of eccentric Wonderland-esque supporting creatures, including walking playing cards, talking door knockers, and an old man with a chicken for a hat. Heck, even the cannonballs in this movie are Muppets. Set design is another huge asset. The labyrinth itself, which includes occasional mythological guardians posing logic puzzles, evokes Lewis Carrol , while the finale takes place in a beautiful M.C. Escher reflexive dreamscape with relativistic gravity and staircases headed off at paradoxical angles. The intricate visual details give the film a high degree of re-watchability: keep an eye out for the illusion where stone outcroppings form a human face when viewed at exactly the right angle. Bowie’s musical contributions turn out to be a wash: “Underground,” which plays over the beginning and end credits, was a radio hit, and “Magic Dance” is a playfully wicked little baby-taunting tune, but to a large extent the 80s synth/drum-machine pop style does little more than date the film. Of course, we wouldn’t be reviewing this pic if there weren’t some delightfully weird nonsense moments to tickle your bizarre bone: a gnome spraying flowers to rid them of fairy pests, goblins tormenting a horned beast with dentures on a stick, and a dream-inside-a-dream at a masked Renaissance ball are a few of the highlights of kiddie surrealism. And, given Labyrinth‘s carnal awakening subtext, we’d be remiss if we didn’t spotlight the scene where Connelly plummets down a shaft filled with gnarled hands that paw at her; it may be unintentional, but it looks a lot like a vertical variation on the climactic hallucination from Roman Polanski‘s sexual repression epic, Repulsion. Which, of course, brings us right back to the most curious element of the film: Bowie’s ambiguous role as a libidinous villain, who the heroine both hates and desires. The Goblin King Jareth represents both the young girl’s seductive childish fantasies and her slowly-stirring real-world sexual desire. Heck, one minute Bowie the sexy goblin is basically taking the girl to her fantasy dress-up prom, and in the next he’s trying to woo her back into a state of pre-erotic childhood whimsy by shapeshifting into a grandma gnome and plying her with plushies from her toddler days. The symbolism of Bowie’s character changes almost as often as a 14-year old’s mood swings, bu that’s actually the perfect accompaniment to a movie which simultaneously expresses nostalgia for childhood together with a resolve to move forward into the world of adult responsibility. It’s something everyone whose gone through adolescence can identify with, and Henson’s decision to leave the tape off his heroine’s bosom allows his fairy tale to blossom.

Besides “Sesame Street” and “the Muppets” honcho Henson, Labyrinth saw contributions from a host of talents. George Lucas was the executive producer. Terry Jones (from Monty Python) wrote the original screenplay (although the final shooting script was changed quite a bit, with input from Lucas among others). Illustrator Brian Froud, who designed the sets for Jim Henson for Dark Crystal, again worked in the art and costume departments on this film—and loaned his infant son Toby to play the stolen child.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…has stood the test of time… it’s still a wild, weird, spooky little world in there.”–Stephen Rea, The Philadelphia Inquirer (2007 re-release)

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

“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: R. Winer, Barry Mahon (Thumbelina)

FEATURING: Jay Ripley, Shay Garner

PLOT: Santa’s sleigh is stuck in the Florida sand, so he shows the assembled kids a movie

until help arrives in the form of a giant rabbit-man in a fire truck.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is weird enough to make the List, but the fact that it can only be endured by injecting Novocaine directly into the part of the brain responsible for processing continuity would make Certifying this movie a public health risk.

COMMENTS: When someone like me, who’s watched They Saved Hitler’s Brain multiple times—voluntarily, not as part of a CIA experiment in breaking interrogee’s wills—tells you that Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is quite possibly the worst movie they’ve ever seen, you should take notice.  First off, there’s the paradoxical fact that Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is hardly Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny at all.  It’s actually much more Thumbelina.  Or, maybe it’s primarily an advertisement for a sad-sack, pre-Disneyland southern Florida bemusement park called Pirates [sic] World.  If you’re confused, and not concerned with the prospect of having Ice Cream Bunny‘s plot spoiled, then read on.

The movie begins with what looks like home-movie footage of Santa’s sleigh stuck in the sand on a Florida beach.  The tone-deaf Kris Kringle sings a plaintive (dubbed) tune of lament, then falls asleep, then psychically summons the neighborhood children to help him.  (This sequence of events suggests that the entire movie may be St. Nick’s heat-stroke influenced nightmare).  At any rate, the children flock to his aid, bringing livestock (?) and a man in a gorilla suit (??) to attempt to dislodge the sleigh out of the half-inch of sand it’s buried in (why did the kids think a pig would succeed where eight magical reindeer had failed?)  When this brain-dead plan predictably bears no fruit, Santa decides to tell everyone a story—a story of eternal hope, a story about a magical place called Pirates World.

Actually, the story is the fairy tale “Thumbelina.”  But we can’t simply jump into it.  That would be disorienting.  Instead, we watch a teenage girl in a red miniskirt (Shay Garner, the only cast member of Ice Cream Bunny to find acting work later in life) sample various rides at Pirate’s World, including their famous “reindeer on a rail” thrill ride, as a disembodied castrato sings “if I were Thumbelina…” on the soundtrack.  Miniskirt girl walks into Pirates World’s “Hans Christen Andersen Fairy Land” Theater, and suddenly the Thumbelina credits roll.  (You may notice that Thumbelina is directed by Barry Mahon, and you may ask yourself, “where do I know that name?”  If you’re an elderly pervert, you’ll soon realize that Barry is the nudie-cutie specialist responsible for such erotic atrocities as Cuban Rebel Girls, Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterly, and The Diary of Knockers McCalla).  The movie-inside-a-movie begins with miniskirt-girl staring into a diorama box while a droning female voice coming out of a speaker on a wall relates the tale of the two-inch-high Thumbelina, who is born out of a flower via a witch’s spell, is abducted by a matrimony-minded frog, and then barely escapes being married off to a decrepit old mole.  Miniskirt-girl imagines herself as the heroine in the story: we see many, many shots of her staring with unbelievably rapt attention at the display.  The actual Thumbelina segments occupy about an hour (!) of the running time, and the production values are significantly higher than in the Santa segments—which is to say, they look like a filmed version of a high school play instead of a ten-year-old’s attempts to make a home movie.  Although the acting is as mind-numbingly unemotive as the rest of Ice Cream Bunny, Thumbelina at least includes mildly interesting and very colorful costumes and sets, including a forest with toadstools that get covered in ice during the winter months, and flower petals large enough to hide skinny teenagers.  Thumbelina finally escapes the constant threat of bestiality and, much like Liza Minelli, eventually marries a fairy prince.  Her alter-ego, miniskirt chick, earns an even more exciting reward: she’s allowed to stroll out of Pirates World.

Back in Ice Cream Bunny, Santa explains the moral of the story he’s just told, which, surprisingly, isn’t “be sure to visit Pirates World!” but rather “never give up hope.”  Following his own advice, in his own way, sweaty Santa sheds his fur coat to reveal his festive red pit-stained t-shirt, and takes another nap.  He’s awakened by the sound of a fire engine siren.  It seems the children’s dog has informed Pirates World employee the Ice Cream Bunny (presumably, he serves Ice Cream at the park—no connection to the dessert is specified by the text) of St. Nick’s plight, and he’s come to help.  Santa gets dressed so the kids won’t see him out of uniform; he has plenty of time to do so, as the ICB’s antique vehicle is only capable of a top speed of about 5 mph, and we watch every second of his journey from the amusement park to the beach.  The Bunny himself is a nightmarish apparition, half mothballed-Easter mascot from a defunct department store, half Frank from Donnie Darko.  Your blood will run cold as you watch him dance a happy jig and pat a shivering blonde tyke on the top of her pony-tailed head.  Saving Santa is no problem for the resourceful Bunny; he simply dumps the jolly old elf into his fire truck and leaves the sleigh behind.  Santa (or someone) later uses magic to telekinetically transmit the sled back to the North Pole—making us wonder, what exactly was Kris Kringle’s dilemma in the first place?

Not weird enough for you?  Well, how about the fact that Tom Sawyer (in a Hawaiian shirt) and Huck Finn (with a raccoon) also show up?  They may be intended as symbolic stand-ins for the audience, because they seem totally nonplussed by the proceedings.

Ice Cream Bunny is less fun than it sounds.  Every shot seems interminable; we watch people slowly walking through Pirates World, we watch the ICB slowly plow his way through the Everglades in his fire truck, we watch Santa slowly take off his belt and coat in the sweltering heat, then slowly put it all back on.  The frequent musical numbers are horrifying; the children are incapable of singing the same note at the same time.  To try to disguise this fact, kazoos make frequent appearances.  Naturally, the sound quality is terrible; everything sounds tinny and distorted, lending a nightmarish edge to the songs.  The voices in the wraparound segments are dubbed, and Santa ad-libs all his dialogue; obviously, given the number of flubbed lines and nonsensical comments, only one take was allowed.  Visually, the movie manages to capture the look of a bad shot-on-video feature before there actually were shot-on-video features.  The cinematography (if that’s what it is) makes beautiful south Florida looks about as appealing as a strip mall in south Philadelphia.

Even after watching it, you may believe Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is some sort of elaborate prank, or a home movie.  Evidence from vintage posters suggests that the film really did play in theaters.  We can only assume that the Santa footage was shot—with the acquiescence (if not the active assistance) of the owners and operators of Pirates World—with the intention of padding out the existing Thumbelina footage to feature length for a holiday matinee parents could drop their unsuspecting kids off at while they shopped for presents.  We can only hope that it played for one week only, and only on one Florida screen.  To think that adult survivors of 1972′s Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny are wandering among us today, panhandling in our streets and renting themselves out as gorilla labor, is a sad and frightening thought.

“R. Winer” never worked again (or if he did, he used a different pseudonym).

There is an alternative way to watch Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny which can turn the experience from “bah! humbug!” to “ho, ho, ho!”  Rifftrax sells the DVD with a humorous running commentary track from “Mystery Science Theater” alums Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett.  Jokes are rapid-fire and often revolve around the decidedly un-jolly appearance of Old St. Nick and the ICB; at other points, simply hearing them rehash the narrative thus far is enough to send you into convulsions of laughter (in character as Santa, Nelson relates “and so the P.A. described how the witch continued to mince about for a while not speaking, just fiddling mostly, ho ho ho ho!”)   At one point Murphy breaks out screaming at the appearance of scary Thumbelina insect puppets; at another, the movie seems to break him, and he begs, “have mercy, I’ll pull the sleigh, I’ll marry Mr. Digger, I’ll do whatever you want!”  Amateurs have been mocking Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny for generations now.  Imagine what professionals will do with this material.  The movie is available to watch “riffed” or “unriffed,” and the DVD also includes a short feature (a Santa Claus meets Punch and Judy short from the 1950s).

Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny Rifftrax preview

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 ”This film is not seized by weirdo-trash quicksand; it’s blessed with a near surgical approach to artless absurdity.”–Joseph A. Ziemba, Bleeding Skull (DVD)

FEATURING: Jim Henson, Frank Oz (puppeteering); Stephen Garlick, Lisa Maxwell, Billie Whitelaw (voice acting)

PLOT: A meek Gelfling sets out on a journey to fulfill the prophecy that he will heal the Dark

Crystal.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  With its advanced puppetry and dazzling color, The Dark Crystal is a visually spectacular movie.  The standard-issue quest story, however, is nothing unusual; just recycled Tolkien, watered down for kids.

COMMENTS:  The Dark Crystal may be the most elaborate puppet show ever staged.  There are no human actors in the film, and the sets—from the spiny castle rising from a bleak landscape to the twisted interior corridors of the Skeksis’ lair to the forests of walking plants—are all fairy tale artifice, storybook illustrations adapted into three-dimensional scenery.  A menagerie of imaginatively designed creatures parade in front of these beautifully textured backdrops.  Most impressive are the evil Skeksis, hunched bipeds who simultaneously resemble reptiles, dinosaurs and birds of prey.  They are opposed by the gentle Mystics, four armed, droning sloths with kind wizardly faces, and Gelflings, the “human” characters, who look like an experiment in breeding J.R.R. Tolkien’s elves with chimpanzees from The Planet of the Apes.  The meticulously molded puppets–each turkey-faced Skeksis’ beak is individually gnarled—have expressive eyes, and their jaws move when they speak.  The rest of the puppet faces, however, are immobile; so despite the minute detailing, the mix of animatronics with static features makes the creatures overall appearance unreal and somewhat uncanny—maybe even “weird.”  (The fact that the puppets move at about three-quarters the speed of a human actor, while seriously hampering the action sequences, also adds to the movie’s artificial reality).  The simplistic, muted emotions conveyed by the creatures’ features aren’t terribly jarring, however, because their puppet shells are inhabited by one-dimensional characters.  Lack of character depth isn’t a problem for the villainous Skeksis.  It’s fun (and even a bit nightmarish) to watch them squabbling among each other, engaging in strange rituals and speaking in individualized voices which run the gamut from dusty croaks to throaty grunts to sinister whines.  The flatness does become an issue when it comes to our Gelfling heroes, though; chosen one Jen, and his eventual companion Kira, are simply bland, projecting little individuality or complexity.  The pair are mild and fearful, but more competent than they realize, so they are effective as surrogates for the children in the audience; adults, however, will have are hard time drumming up much enthusiasm for these two meek ciphers, especially since the outcome of their quest is literally foreordained (is there ever a salvation prophecy in a fantasy movie that the heroes don’t manage to fulfill?).  Jen the reluctant Hobbit (I mean, Gelfling) must return a Ring (I mean, a broken shard of the crystal) to the heart of Mordor (I mean, the castle of the Skeksis), while being stalked on his journey by a skulking Gollum (I mean, the banished Skeksis Chancellor).  This basic story structure is enough to enthrall kids, but the best we adults can say about it is that it’s comfortably familiar, and that the plot never distracts us from looking at the pretty pictures.  And there are some memorable moments to behold: the ritual opening with the Skeksis gathered around the glowing purple Crystal, absorbing its power; the Gelflings floating downstream through a storybook forest; the caravan of Mystics trudging across a desert at sunset.  If you had those moments imprinted on you as a child, you’re likely to remember The Dark Crystal as a fantasy masterpiece; if you see it for the first time as an adult, you’ll see an impressive puppet show, and maybe wish that you could go back in time to an innocent age when it would have been pure magic to behold.

The unsung hero of The Dark Crystal is illustrator Brian Froud, who was responsible for the creature designs.  Jim Henson would team up with Froud again in 1986 for Labyrinth, a more complex, allegorical story that mixed puppets with live actors Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“As narrative, the incidents in The Dark Crystal are unremarkable; as the excuse for special effects, fanciful decor and eccentric characters, they do nicely enough. Here, as in such ambitious films as Blade Runner and Diva, texture is more important than text. “–Richard Corliss, Time (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Trip Carter,” who remembered this [as well as Labyrinth] as “overflowing with weirdness.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTOR: Norman Z. McLeod

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

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

FEATURING: Mathew Mackay, Michel Maillot, Siluck Saysanasy, Alison Darcy, Michael Hogan

PLOT: A boy loses his hair from a fright, but some grateful ghosts give him a secret recipe for

regrowing it; complications ensure when he doesn’t follow the formula exactly.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s weird—scarringly weird—to kids, but this follicular fairy tale is unlikely to have the same effect on grown-ups.

COMMENTS: The most noteworthy thing about The Peanut Butter Solution isn’t any of the weird stuff that happens onscreen; it’s the amazingly consistent reflections of adults who recall seeing it as a child.  Anytime this movie is mentioned anywhere on the Net, you will see some variation of the same response: “I saw this as a kid!  I tried describing the plot to someone who hadn’t seen it and they thought I was making it up! I was beginning to think I dreamed it!”  Almost uniformly, these adult survivors of The Peanut Butter Solution mention that the movie gave them nightmares.  I don’t think many adults will find this film that creepy when seeing it for the first time, but it’s easy to see why it freaked out so many kids.  Leaving the weird and the scary moments to one side, just consider the number of childhood anxieties this film touches on: fear of being made fun of by other kids for being different.  First encounters with death.  A scary neighborhood house (where a couple of local winos burnt to death).  An absent parent.  Fear of oncoming puberty.  The suspicion that authority figures aren’t just criticizing you for your own good; they really do have it out for you.  Abduction.  Even the Brothers Grimm were never this macabre.  (There is a real modern fairy tale quality to the story, which we’re reminded of when the resourceful kids try to use a trail of sugar to track down the bad guys).  A movie that dealt with these themes in a straightforward way would likely upset tykes, but Peanut Butter Solution adds nightmarish imagery: a kid who’s gone totally bald (particularly frightening to a youngster who’s vaguely aware of childhood leukemia and chemotherapy).  An nameless horror in an attic of an old house.  Hobo ghosts.  A boy smearing a mixture of peanut butter, rotten eggs and dead flies on his head.  Hair that grows so fast it gets snagged in trees as he walks to school.  Fur flowing out of a kid’s pants leg.  A child imprisoned in an elevated box with his hair hooked up to a loom.  Paintings that you can walk into.  All of these strange sights are delivered with the matter-of-factness of a dream.  When young Micheal’s hair starts growing centimeters per minute, his father and sister are amazed, but not alarmed by this violation of the laws of nature.  Despite the fact that his tresses lengthen visibly as he sits in class, a teacher implies Michael’s lying: hair only grows a half an inch per month, it’s a scientific fact.  When Michael and dozens of schoolmates are abducted, the boy’s family is concerned, but not terrified or bereaved.  Even children have to realize that there’s something off and unnatural about people’s reactions in the movie; young Micheal’s terrified and depressed by the fact that his body is in revolt against him, but none of his adult protectors share his alarm or identify with his sadness.  Kids won’t pick up on the pedestrian acting and the flubbed attempts at comedy, though these factors will likely annoy adults.   But even for a grown-up, the script is interesting and unpredictable enough to overcome the workmanlike thesping (and even to make you overlook the vapid, oh-so-80s synth-pop score).  With its deep imagination and grasp of childhood psychology, I could imagine The Peanut Butter Solution working more effectively as a picture book than as a movie; the Signor would be a far scarier villain in the mind’s eye than he is onscreen, and the surreal situations would make illustrators salivate.

Despite the legions of adults who remember The Peanut Butter Solution from their youth, the film has never been available on DVD.  (VHS copies are not hard to come by).  I have a theory as to why this is: a pre-fame Celine Dion sings two (frankly lame) songs on the soundtrack, and I suspect her camp is unwilling to clear their rights without a hefty down payment first.  Whenever a film is unavailable due to rights squabbles, it’s a tragedy, but there may be a silver lining here: at least the movie won’t give a whole new generation of kids nightmares.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Imagine a weird low-budget variant on The Boy with Green Hair (1948) and the Dr Seuss film The 5000 Fingers of Dr T (1953)… some people have strange memories of The Peanut Butter Solution from growing up in the 1980s but the film sounds much more wacky in description than the pedestrian way it is directed on screen.”–Richard Scheib, Moria: The Science-Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Review (video)

(This movie was nominated for review by “James,” who said “I saw it as a child and was freaked out and I’ve seen it recently and it’s just as weird…check it out!” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTOR: Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

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

More of Everything is Terrible at their website: http://www.everythingisterrible.com/.

DIRECTED BY: Henry Selick

FEATURING: Voices of Chris Sarandon, Danny Elfman, Catherine O’Hara, Ken Page

PLOT: Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloweentown, discovers Christmas and tries

to recreate it, with ghoulish results.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: As a children’s film, The Nightmare Before Christmas has a high hurdle to overcome.  Since it’s aimed at kids, the movie is permitted to indulge in imagination and fantasy, so long as it uses a conventional story framework and takes a stab at conveying a useful moral lesson.  Nightmare has a great, morbid motivating idea and is a triumph of macabre art design, but at heart it doesn’t stray very far from the childrens’ film format.  If it’s eventually to be counted amongst the weird, it will be solely for its incidentals and visuals.

COMMENTS:  The opening song introduces us to the ghastly denizens of Halloweentown, including the expected assortment of witches, vampires and ghosts, but also a creature with black and white striped snakes for fingers, the “clown with the tearaway face,” and a two-faced mayor with a spinning top for a head and a freakishly phallic stovepipe hat.  This legion of scary weirdos are ruled over by Jack Skellington, an elegant but spindly skeleton in a pinstripe suit.  A grim gray pallor hangs over the town, which features an Expressionist pumpkin patch/boneyard with slanted tombstones and a curlicue hill permanently posed before a giant yellow moon.  Bored with the repetitive routine of  Halloween, Skellington seeks new vistas and finds one when he stumbles onto Christmastown, an eye-popping festival of lights and toys set among blinding white snowbanks ruled over by a jolly fat man; the town provides the perfect visual and spiritual contrast to gloomy Halloweentown.  A holiday architect looking for a new challenge, Jack decides to “take over” Christmas (incidentally kidnapping Santa Claus).  After futile attempts to ferret out the meaning of Christmas by dissecting teddy bears and placing crushed ornaments in boiling beakers, Skellington hatches a plan to pose as Kris Kringle and deliver toys himself, which leads to the film’s keystone sequence: a horrific Christmas Eve sleigh ride through a doomed village, where the Santa-suited skeleton leaves ghoulishly inappropriate gifts for Christmastown’s tots, including a severed head and a tannenbaum-swallowing snake.  It all ends in disaster, as Jack, who began with the best of intentions, realizes that his amateur staging of Christmas was a Nightmare and that he has to set things right and reaffirm his devotion to the Satanic rites of All Hallow’s Eve.  The moral seems to be, attempts to understand other cultures are doomed to failure; stick to your own kind.

The character designs and intricate, almost hidden gruesome details (like the skeletal Halloween cock that crows the dawn) are the triumph of Nightmare.  With a couple of exceptions—the bubbly, Broadwayesque “What’s This?” when bemused Jack first discovers Christmastown (“There’s children throwing snowballs instead of throwing heads/They’re busy building toys and absolutely no one’s dead!”) and a deviant number sung by three mischievous trick or treaters who plan to kidnap “Sandy Claws” (“Kidnap the Sandy Claws, throw him in a box/Bury him for ninety years, then see if he talks”)—Danny Elfman’s songs are flat and unmemorable, advancing the plot but not thrilling the ear.  The story is also exceedingly thin, even at its trim running time of under 80 minutes.  The original concept came from a Burton parody of Clement Moore’s “Twas the Night Before Christmas;” to pad out the running time, a romantic subplot and an antagonist were added.  The love interest is Sally, a stitched-together female Frankenstein forever losing her limbs.  She’s constantly scheming to escape her creator, a duck-billed mad scientist with a detachable brainpan who wants to keep her locked in his castle, and she acts as a cautionary voice for Jack, trying to warn him off his insane Yuletide scheme.  There’s no spark to their relationship, though, and though their romantic ending is pretty, it’s also pretty meaningless in story terms.  The villain, Oogie Boogie the Boogeyman, is another wonderful character in search of a plot function.  A burlap sack stuffed with creepy crawlies, gruff Ken Page gives him a 1920s boogie-woogie singer’s voice, and he makes a hell of a hellish impression.  But he’s introduced late and has no real motivation: it’s unclear why he thinks that bumping off Santa Claus will help him unseat Skellington as king of Halloweentown.  He pads the film, but his main purposes are to set up an unnecessary, anticlimactic action sequence for the finale, and (more importantly) to provide Selick the opportunity to build another magical set.  And Oogie’s lair is it’s own freaky, fun world: his hideout is casino themed, with living gunfighter slot machines and worms crawling through the pips of dice, and it’s bathed UV lights to give the puppets an eerie glow.  Though the script could have done much more to make him a meaningful antagonist, the awesome visuals this boogeyman inspires are reason enough for him to take up space in Nightmare‘s world.  The entire story takes a back seat to the cute, Gothic animation, so why should Sally and Oogie Boogie be any different?

The idea for Nightmare was originally sketched out by Tim Burton at Disney Studios, before they fired him for “wasting company resources” by making Frankenweenie.  After the director found success outside the Magic Kingdom, Disney was willing to work with him again, and he served as Nightmare‘s producer and even got his name in the title.  In a case of history repeating itself, the studio again found the finished work too morbid and were afraid it would frighten young children, so they released it under their Touchstone subsidiary.  Despite rave reviews, Nightmare was not an immediate success, but it has found a cult audience on video.  Disney has since fully re-embraced the movie, removing all traces of the old Touchstone logos and prominently slapping the Disney name back on the prints, just as if they had been 100% behind it before it became a hit.

Related: Alfred Eaker’s A Few Odd Yuletide Favs.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[Burton] pulls adult minds down to the surreal darkness of childish imagination — where the real nightmares are. But through Burton’s eyes, these dark dreamscapes aren’t bad places at all. In fact, they’re quite wonderful.”–Desson Howe, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Barrett Oliver, Shelley Duvall, Daniel Stern

PLOT: A young boy reanimates his recently deceased dog, but the undead pet is not a hit with

the neighbors.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s not weird; in fact, it’s an extremely conventional, if awfully charming, Frankenstein parody.

COMMENTS: Tim Burton’s second effort is a surprisingly fluid and assured bit of storytelling that attracted some remarkable talent for a short film, most notably a post-Shining Shelley Duvall (who had some sort of sixth sense for locating and working for offbeat auteurs) as Mom Frankenstein.  Dad Daniel Stern was an established thespian who would go on to greater fame as a voice actor.  Actor/director Paul Bartel (Death Race 2000) appears briefly as the science teacher who puts the idea of resurrecting the dog in young Victor Frankenstein’s mind when he demonstrates how to make an ex-frog’s legs jump by applying electrodes.  Despite the ability Burton demonstrated here to attract and manage top talent, Disney famously dropped the ball and fired him after seeing Frankenweenie, without letting him try his hand at a feature, complaining that the film was too scary and a waste of resources.  In hindsight, it’s difficult to see why shortsighted Disney execs thought that Burton was too weird and dark to work for the Mouse.  It’s hard to imagine anyone thought this childhood farce would give any but the most overprotected weenie kid nightmares.  (More likely, the studio believed that anyone who would voluntarily shoot a featurette in black and white was not to be trusted).  The subject matter is only mildly offbeat—it’s a cute, clockwork parody of Frankenstein, a acknowledged classic.  There are laughs that are mildly morbid—when stitched-together Sparky springs a leak the first time he laps from his water bowl, or when Dad Frankenstein muses, “I guess we can’t punish Victor for bringing Sparky back from the dead,” but nothing alienatingly weird.  The directorial style is utterly traditional: the musical cues come at the expected moments, and when you see Victor playing fetch with his dog Sparky by rolling a ball out onto the suburban street, you almost groan at the pedestrian foreshadowing.  That’s not to say the movie is bad; in fact, it’s charming in its familiarity.  Kids enjoy it, but not half as much as boomer grownups nostalgic for their “monster kid” days when they used to stay up late on weekends and watch Zacherley or Ghoulardi host a Frankenstein marathon.  It’s a droll adult view of a child’s eye view of a James Whale nightmare.

Burton has been promising to remake the short as a full-length, stop-motion animated feature for years.  A release date is tentatively set for 2012 but the project doesn’t appear to have progressed beyond the planning stages.  In the meantime the original short is available, together with the short Vincent, on the Nightmare Before Christmas DVD.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Frankenweenie captures perfectly the spirit of whimsy mixed with the grotesque that typifies the Burton oeuvre.”–Deeky Wentworth, Surfin’ Dead (DVD)

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