“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.)

FEATURING: Cory McAbee, Rocco Sisto, Gregory Russell Cook, Annie Golden, Tom Aldredge

PLOT:  A space pilot trades a cat for a “real live girl” whom he can exchange for the “Boy Who

Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast,” whom he intends to swap in turn for the remains of a dead Venusian stud in order to collect a reward.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Genrewise, The American Astronaut could be described as many things—space western, garage band musical, nonsense comedy—but the one thing it indisputably is is a cult movie.  That is to say, it’s a specialized and peculiar little flick that has a devoted group of followers, and a larger contingent of outsiders who are nonplussed by its popularity.  I have to admit that in this case I lean slightly towards the second group.  American Astronaut is very weird (it has a character named “the Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast,” for goodness sake), but some of it is tedious, like ninety minutes spent watching a clan of hipsters swapping in-jokes you aren’t let in on.  I can sense the magic other people get from the pic without being able to directly experience it myself.  This is a movie on the cusp of being certified as one of the Best Weird Movies Ever Made, but it will require some reader acclaim to sway my opinion towards adding it to the List.  So get to promoting the movie in the comments, Astronaut fans.

COMMENTS:  How many movies can boast a line like “Gentlemen, the Boy Who Saw a Woman’s Breast has left our planet” or a musical number like “The Girl with a Vagina Made of Glass”?  How about a villain who is incapable of killing unless he has no possible grudge against his victim and a “real live girl” who (in this early stage of her development) is just a suitcase that plays a rock tune when you lift a slat on the casing?  The American Astronaut creates a unique, absurd, but consistent universe through a dry, deadpan DIY approach.  It’s set in a boy’s cosmos, where women are strange creatures who live on one planet while the men live on another.  The movie’s nonsense proclivities are a narrative film incarnation of the free-associative lyrics of writer/director Cory McAbee’s mildly punkish band, the Billy Nayer Show.  One song goes, “A-E-, A-E-I, A-E-I-O-U, I owe you nothing, but sometimes you owe me I-U-A-I-E”; another consists of one singer repeatedly chanting “no” while another harmonizes with a rhythmic “tee-nee-oh-yeah.”  When they start smiling and singing about “the baby in a jar with glasses on and a gun,” it seems like a return to the real world.  Visually, the movie does an excellent job disguising its low-budget origins with black and white photography that keeps the backgrounds in deep shadows, suggesting the existence of a wider, deeper world than they can actually afford to show.  Silhouettes are used to create an illusion of grandness, as when the Boy Who…—dressed, as is his habit, like the messenger god Mercury in an art-deco winged helmet—dances in a spotlight for the workers of Jupiter and casts a massive shadow on the crumbling factory wall behind him.  The musical numbers, which sometimes sound like fractured nursery rhymes with odd, childlike melodies, and sometimes like a tight-knit garage band, aren’t half bad.  It’s amusing that the featured singers (for the most part) aren’t glamorous rock star types, but average-looking middle aged white guys; paunchy, baggy-eyed bartender Eddie (character actor Bill Buell) rocks harder than anyone in the cast.  It’s easy to see, and to admire, the love and care that went into the production; predicting whether this highly peculiar vision will click with you in particular is a trickier proposition.  One downside is that McAbee’s spaceman-for-hire isn’t the charismatic rake in the Han Solo mold the film wants him to be; the star is outshined by his co-stars.  Another minus is that the film is slow to get into gear, starting off with longish and not particularly rewarding scenes of McAbee shaving and taking a long spacewalk to the Ceres bar.  Things don’t start to take off until the dance contest kicks in, about twenty minutes into the running time.  That’s when my favorite scene occurs.  It’s a long, rambling warmup joke about “hertz donuts” told by an aged emcee (Broadway veteran Tom Aldredge) with multiple misemphasized punchlines.  The bar full of rogues and roughnecks laugh at all the wrong places as the shaggy-dog gag drags on and on, ending with the comedian confessing “I’ve never understood this joke” amidst peals of laughter.  The tale is a condensed metaphor for the American Astronaut, a movie that paces itself like a comedy but, when it comes time to tell a joke, consistently zigs into nonsense when you expect it to zag into a laugh.

The American Astronaut has a small but rabid cult, but it could have a much bigger one if it had landed a distribution deal.  As it is, the film is mainly sold through McAbee’s personal website, and has never received the widespread distribution from Netflix or other rental outlets it would need to become a breakout cult hit.  The professionally-made DVD features an interesting, off-center variation on the director’s commentary—McAbee discusses the picture while screening it for a bar full of patrons who ask him questions.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A sui generis, love-it-or-hate-it exercise in homegrown American surrealism.”–Hazel-Dawn Dumpert, L.A. Weekly (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Rob” who called it “A strange little film put out by the band the Billy Nayer Show” and added, “It may not make your list, but it’s definitely worthy of watching. The movie features a character known only as ‘The Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast.’  I’m pretty sure you couldn’t not watch that.”Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Juan Solanas, Andrea Arnold, Christopher Nolan, Roy Andersson, Toby MacDonald, Lynne Ramsay, Jan Svankmajer, Mathieu Kassovitz, Run Wrake, Virgil Widrich, Ridley Scott, Lars von Trier, Balint Kenyeres, Anders Thomas Jensen, Martin McDonagh, Nanni Moretti

FEATURING: Natalie Press, Brendan Gleeson, Rúaidhrí Conroy, Klas-Gösta Olsson, Kris Marshall, Johannes Silberschneider, Tony Scott, Ulrich Thomsen

PLOT: This collection of sixteen award-winning shorts made by Europeans (mostly Brits) is a

mix of dramas, comedies, and experimental pieces.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Compilations aren’t eligible for the List.  Although there are several short films on this set that are both weird, and great for their length, none of them have the weight it would take to displace a full-length feature film from the List.

COMMENTS: Like any box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get with this collection of sixteen shorts—it could be a caramel, a raspberry creme, or one of the dreaded coconuts.  The wide array of styles from artists working free of commercial concerns makes collections like this excellent primers on what cinema can accomplish, and this selection  from short film specialists Cinema 16 is one of the most award-studded compilations you’ll find.  Not having to worry about the box office receipts allows short film-makers to experiment with technique and go weirder than they otherwise would; indeed, about half of the movies here have at least a nodding acquaintance with the bizarre, while a couple are full-fledged works of surrealist art.  But no matter what direction your tastes run, rest assured there is something here to delight, and to bore, every film fan.

For completeness’ sake, I’ll briefly run down the realism-based entries first, in ascending order of quality.  We’ll then spend a little more time with the experimental offerings, a few of which are extremely important to the world of weird film.

The oldest film, Ridley Scott’s 1956 Boy and Bicycle, about a lad who takes a bike ride to the beach and carries on an inner monologue the whole time, is a tedious exercise that will remind you of the worst film school indulgences.  It’s included here because of the stature of the director, but it shows off little of the talent he would later bring to Alien and Blade Runner.  Pierre le Pou (1990) is an inconsequential comedy about an uncoordinated man trying to impress a talented and attractive female with his basketball prowess.  Seemingly aimed at flattering film festival fans for their superior taste—though there’s sly satire in the portrayal of the pompous manager of an art theater—The Opening Day of Close-up shows the arthouse fallout when Close-up get steamrolled by The Lion King on its opening day.  Extremely thick Scottish accents make Lynn Ramsay’s Gasman, a drama about a man who takes his children to spend one day a year with their half-siblings, very difficult to follow for American viewers.  Before Dawn is the story of illegal immigrants trying to enter a country through a cornfield.  It’s done in a single 13-minute tracking shot and is a technically amazing feat of choreography and camerawork, but there is little for the audience to connect with storywise.  The mildly amusing Election Night is a satire involving a principled liberal desperate to get to the polls before they close who finds himself in a taxicab driven by an obnoxious racist.  Funnier is Je T’Aime John Wayne, a jazzy black and white portrait of an English man who patterns his life after French New Wave films; anyone should find it hilarious, but a knowledge of cinema trivia will pay extra dividends for film fans (e.g., the love interest is a pixie girl named Zazie).  The most memorable of the “straight” films is Andrea Arnold’s Oscar-winning Wasp, a sadly believable and strangely sympathetic portrait of a very unfit single mom struggling to feed her four children while longing to find a sex life for herself.

On to the weirder offerings:

The Irish black comedy Six Shooter is another Oscar winner, and one of the best films in the collection.  It isn’t strictly a weird movie, but it deserves an honorable mention thanks to a funny fantasy sequence wherein a “short fella” repeatedly stabs a cow with a screwdriver to relieve it’s “trapped wind.”  The scenario, by playwright Martin McDonagh, here directing his first movie, involves Brendan Gleeson losing his wife, then sharing a train ride home with the most obnoxious traveler imaginable.  Corpses pile up as Glesson’s character experiences the worst day of his, or anybody’s, life.  Rúaidhrí Conroy is extraordinarily loathsome as the foul- and motor-mouthed sociopath.

Nocturne was Lars von Trier‘s final film school short before moving on to features.  Sadly, it has a stereotypically pretentious “film school” look and feel, but it’s clearly an experimental work.  The “story” concerns a woman who’s afraid of sunlight.  All of the shots are low-light and murky; it’s often a struggle to make out what we’re seeing.  There are some memorable shots, like the double image of a woman watching as a solarized man breaks through a plate-glass window in the background.  In the commentary, the director is more than a little amused by the odd visual theories of geometrical correspondences espoused by his earlier self.

Doodlebug is a one-effect, one-joke effort from Christopher Nolan.  It’s amusing and lightly Kafkaesque, but at a mere three minutes it doesn’t hint at what the director is capable of.

Cinematographer Juan Solanas’ directing debut, The Man Without a Head, won a short film Jury Prize at Cannes, and is a favorite for many.  It’s about a man without a head (naturally), who lands a hot date and decides he needs to buy a noggin for the occasion.  Comic complications result. The scenario is similar to Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s short “La Cravatte” (1957).  Unlike some others, I didn’t find this affectionate fable about self-acceptance moving, but the art direction and music are unquestionably excellent.  The headless man in a tuxedo dancing like Fred Astaire in his dingy apartment is unforgettable.  The imaginary French city (based on Marseilles) has a grimy but elegant Europe-between-the-wars look, and it’s entirely draped in drab olives, greens and yellows that clearly evoke The City of Lost Children (1995).

Copy Shop is about a man who works at a copy shop and one day discovers that things he photocopies show up in the real world; he decides to photocopy himself over and over, resulting in an anarchic world of doppelgängers on top of doppelgängers.  The movie’s unique look results from the fact that what we see on the screen is really a painstakingly fluid animation composed from 18,000 actual paper photocopies, with copy errors and low-toner moments included (and sometimes deliberately induced).  The minimalist score by Alexander Zlamal is reminiscent of Philip Glass; the string lines chase each other like a rondo, aurally mimicking the visual copies.  It’s an impressive experiment that results in a wonderfully distressed film.

Roy Andersson‘s World of Glory (1991) prefigures the precise, absurd cinematic hypnotism the auteur would perfect in Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You, the Living (2007).  In a scene that’s never placed in context, the movie begins with a crowd silently watching nude people being loaded into the back of a truck, gassed, and driven away.  A middle-aged man keeps glancing back at the camera with a mildly disturbed expression.  (Throughout the film minor characters continue to acknowledge the camera with the same strange look).  We then follow the man through a series of static, repressed tableaux showing his daily life, including his son getting a corporate logo tattooed on his head, his refusal to release the wine cup while taking communion, and finally his insomnia caused by the fact that he hears someone screaming in the distance.  Andersson’s dim view of humanity as a species of moral cowards obsessed with meaningless banality gets under your skin.  It’s cruel and ridiculous, but it’s also frighteningly accurate.  Fans of the director’s grim feature films will feel at home here.

Jabberwocky (1971) is another movie that foreshadows a director’s later work: in this case, Jan Svankmajer signals his intent to mix Lewis Carroll and Sigmund Freud together into a horrifying yet whimsical witches’ brew, an alchemy that would come to full ferment in Alice (1988).  The Czech stop-motion surrealist indulges his love of vintage objects here, particularly dolls.  Weirdophiles will chuckle with delight as Svankmajer takes us on a tour of his unfiltered subconscious.  A narrator reads the poem “Jabberwocky” while a wardrobe wends its way through a forest, then winds up in an apartment full of toys.  The poem soon ends but we continue to watch as Svankmajer manipulates the objects in the room: a suit of clothes dances and rides a rocking horse, dolls indulge in cannibalism, and branches spontaneously grow and drop apples which immediately rot and split open to reveal worms.  An important short film in the history of stop-motion animation, and Eastern European surrealism.

The gem of the entire collection is Run Wrake‘s fabulous (in both senses of the word) Rabbit (2005).  The story of greedy children who slaughter animals for personal gain but are frustrated by a magical idol, it’s told using images from an old English reading primer.  The names of common objects hover in the air.  Rabbit is such an amazing weird film that we gave it its own post years ago (you can watch the embedded movie at that link, as well).

A review by the Sunday Times described one Cinema 16 collection as “film studies in a box.”  That’s only a slight exaggeration.  Any aspiring filmmaker who watched all of these sixteen movies and paid close attention to the included commentaries would be inspired, and fairly well prepared, to go out and make his own short film.

One final note: Cinema 16 has put out two DVDs titled European Short Films, one available in Region 1 (U.S. and Canada) and one in Region 2 (UK and Europe).  The lineups on the two sets are different.  We reviewed the U.S. version.  Copy Shop, Opening Day of Close-Up, World of Glory, The Man Without a Head, Election Night, Nocturne and Jabberwocky overlap both sets, but the Region 2 version has nine different films, including entries by Jean-Luc Goddard, Tom Twyker, and Chris Morris.  If you’re looking for a particular title check carefully to make sure it’s included in the set you’re ordering.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… these directors seem to prefer surrealism and unusual imagery… for the most serious of viewers, but it meets its goal of introducing viewers to the range of European short film.”–James A. Stewart, DVD Verdict (DVD)

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.)

DIRECTED BY: Otto Preminger

FEATURING: Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Groucho Marx, Alexandra Hay, John Phillip Law, Austin Pendleton, Frankie Avalon, Arnold Stang, Frank Gorshin, Burgess Meredith, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney, Peter Lawford, George Raft, Richard Kiel, Harry Nilsson

PLOT: Tony is a retired mobster living in the suburbs with wife Flo and daughter Darlene, who has an unwelcome (to Tony) interest in dating hippies.  A crime kingpin known as “God” pressures the ex-hit man into doing one last job—going undercover in Alcatraz to assassinate a stool pigeon.  When Tony accidentally ingests LSD in the pen, his entire worldview is flipped and he decides to ditch the hit and break out of the clink; meanwhile, Flo and Darlene have taken it upon themselves to track down God with the help of a band of flower children.

BACKGROUND:

• Director Otto Preminger had been nominated as Best Director for two Academy Awards (for Laura and The Cardinal).  Known for pushing the envelope on taboo topics, Preminger was instrumental in breaking the back of the Hollywood Production Code by releasing The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), which dealt with the then-forbidden topic of heroin addiction, without MPAA approval. 
• Skidoo was a giant flop sandwiched between two other Preminger flops, Hurry Sundown (1967) and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970).  Despite its notorious reputation, Skidoo was part of a series of failed films and was not solely responsible for Preminger’s fall from grace.
• Two years after Skidoo, screenwriter Doran William Cannon penned the exceedingly weird Brewster McCloud (1970).
• This was Groucho Marx’s final film.  He dropped LSD (with writer Paul Krassner) in preparation for the role.
• Preminger also took LSD, supposedly under the guidance of none other than Timothy Leary (who promoted the film in the trailer).  Preminger had originally been slated to make an anti-acid movie, but had decided that he should experience the drug before condemning it.  After his trip he decided to make Skidoo instead.
• Frank Gorshin, Burgess Meredith, and Cesar Romero, who all have cameo bits in Skidoo, had also appeared together in the same movie just two years before: as the Riddler, the Penguin, and the Joker in Batman: The Movie (1966).  Director Otto Preminger had a rare acting role as Mr. Freeze in two episodes of the “Batman” TV show in 1966.
• After flopping in 1968, Skidoo became virtually a lost film—not because it was suppressed or the prints were unavailable, but because no one seemed interested in exhibiting it.  A Turner Classic Movies screening in 2008 was the first opportunity most people had to view the movie since its release.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Jackie Gleason’s acid trip is one for the ages, particularly when he sees Groucho Marx’s cigar-puffing head affixed atop a rotating wood screw.  His response to the apparition, naturally, is to say “Oh no, I’m not playing your game… go ahead, drop,” at which point the screwball vision slips down the prison sink drain.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Like an onion soaked in high-grade acid, Skidoo contains

Screenwriter Larry Karaszewski discussing the trailer for Skidoo (1968)

layers upon layers of weirdness.  In 1968 it was actually not all that far out for a movie to take us on a swirly psychedelic journey to check out that purple haze all in our brains.  What was freaky was for establishment icons Otto Preminger, Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing and Groucho Marx to serve as our tour guides.  Add to that the fact that the film is a notorious flop full of painfully strained attempts at comedy, jaw-dropping left-field musical numbers, scattershot satire, and Harry Nilsson singing the closing credits, and you have a singular pro-drug oddity that mines rare camp.

COMMENTS: Watching Otto Preminger’s Skidoo is like listening to a cover version of the Doors’ Oedipal epic “The End” performed by a scatting Tony Bennett (“mother… I want to… scooby-dooby doo da doo, oh yeah!”)  It’s pure squaresville, man, yet how can you tear your eyes and ears away from the spectacle of an aging entertainer desperately trying to appear “with-it” while simultaneously staying true to their own outdated idioms?  A purely cynical attempt to cash in on youth culture might have resulted in a deplorable misfire, but here, sexagenarian Preminger is genuinely intoxicated by the hippie movement.  The gruff European,  known for his combative nature and dictatorial behavior on the set, so ancient that he was actually born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, truly believes in peace and love and the transformative power of LSD.  It’s the sincerity of his conviction in Flower Power, coupled with his fumbling outsider attempt to express that zeitgeist through a psychedelic sort of vaudeville, that creates something more interesting than a cheap counterculture cash-in.  His conviction lays the substrate for a camp classic.  Preminger doesn’t seem to realize that, in the eyes of his audience, he and his thespian cronies (who include almost everyone in Hollywood over thirty with a SAG card) represent the very Establishment he’s attempting to mock.  Although the script takes some light satirical jabs at stoner philosophy (“if you can’t dig nothing, you can’t dig anything, you dig?” muses John Phillip Law as “Stash”), for the most part Skidoo‘s hippie heroes are a superior race of draft-card burning, pumpkin-puffing (yes, they smoke pumpkins) peaceniks who come off so smug and virtuous that they almost make you sympathize with the Ohio National Guard.

Anarchic all-star comedy extravaganzas were still all the rage in the late sixties, following a formula pioneered by 1963′s cameo-packed It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (see also 1967′s Casino Royale with Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress et al.; 1970′s Myra Breckinridge with Raquel Welch, Mae West et. al;, and probably a dozen other examples you can think of).  Preminger enlisted every talk show mainstay who wasn’t guest-hosting Johnny Carson that month for a walk-on role, including three major “Batman” villains.  The significance of many of these “big names” will be lost on contemporary audiences, but even if you don’t know much about Peter Lawford or George Raft, you can almost see the stale aura of anti-hipness radiating from them.  Dour and irritable, Gleason makes for a reasonable Tony Banks, playing him as Ralph Kramden with a rap sheet, but the craziest casting coup was an landing an elderly Groucho Marx to play the gangster kingpin “God.”  Although Groucho demonstrates infamously uninspired line readings (it’s sometimes claimed they were read off cue cards), he’s such an iconic presence that he manages to emerge from this mess with his image untarnished.  In fact, I’m serious when I say I can’t think of a better sendoff for this iconoclastic comedy legend than going down in a hail of absurdity: that final shot of him dressed as a Hare Krishna, sailing off to parts unknown in a skiff while puffing on a spliff. 

Skidoo‘s real surprise is then-47-year-old, gravel-voiced Broadway legend Carol Channing, who throws herself into the role of Tony’s wife Flo with the shameless abandon of a true professional.  She does the watusi, strips down to yellow pantyhose, and dresses as a pirate to lead the hippie assault on God’s yacht (I swear I am not making any of this up) while singing “Skidoo, skidoo, the only thing that matters is with who you do…”  It’s the cheeriest of career suicides: while the other stars on hand hide out in the shadows, hoping not to draw attention to themselves, Carol is brashly belting out the theme song, putting her heart and lungs into every line.  Channing is wonderfully uninhibited; of the past-their-prime principals, she alone actually captures the spirit of youth.

Skidoo announces its intent to baffle audiences from its disorienting opening credits, a Saul Bass sequence with a cartoon convict in stereotypical black and white striped prison garb (it looks more like a caricature of director Preminger than of star Gleason) holding a multicolored flower.  The credits click off just as they’re starting; it turns out Gleason and Channing are at home, flipping through channels with their remote.  Besides the credits for the movie they’re currently starting in, they also catch bits of a John Wayne flick (Preminger’s own In Harm’s Way), a Senate hearing on organized crime (plot point alert!), and a series of commercial parodies featuring a smoking dog and a beer-drinking pig.  The demented fun slows down in the succeeding minutes as the elaborate plot is laid out piece by piece.  One of Skidoo‘s major issues is that its badness is placed up front, while most of its awe-inspiring craziness is backloaded into the final half hour.  There are some deranged moments in the early going to keep you entertained: Gleason’s split-screen slapstick flashbacks of his criminal career and a visit to Frankie Avalon’s swinging bachelor pad with its waterbed that descends to the basement when it’s not needed.  For the most part, however, the film’s first hour focuses on explication—introducing us to a mob of underworld types contrasted with a cadre of “assorted beautiful people” who the authorities think are “a backward step in the evolution of mankind”—and cringeworthy comic misfires (how many times can the characters proclaim that they’re going looking for God before the joke wears thin?)

Things intensify delightfully when Gleason, now undercover in jail with the intent of rubbing out Mickey Rooney, accidentally licks an envelope laced with LSD and takes his first sojourn into the astral realms.  The (once) respected comedian’s eyes widen, and he swats at the imaginary flies flitting around his body while his two-inch high cellmates look on.  As his “naked spotless intellect” becomes like “a transparent vacuum” (in the words of his trip guide), Preminger breaks out the undulating fisheye lens and the pink and orange aura effects: the novice tripper lies down and sees eyeballs poking through the rivet holes in the prison bunk bed.  “I see mathematics!” he says as he hallucinates a Tommy gun punching out equations in bullet holes.  A vision of “God” on a rotating screw comes to torment him, but he wills it down the sink drain.  About half the cast—including Rooney singing and dancing with big bags of cash and Channing explaining that “the truth is often stranger than lots of things”—appear to him through a wavy pink haze as he stares into a pool of water.  The trip lasts a good ten minutes, making it possibly Hollywood’s longest LSD sequence, and ends with a life-changing epiphany that sets Gleason off on a path of righteousness (and more importantly, of hipness).  “I want a flower,” he says when he loses his ego.   His transformation is so exemplary that a fellow jailbird wonders, “Maybe if I take some of that stuff I wouldn’t have to rape anybody anymore?”

The madness mounts in the final half hour as the reformed Gleason hatches a plan to escape Alcatraz by blending sheets of blotter acid into the prison biscuits on the night Warden Burgess Meredith shows his solidarity with the prisoners by having the entire staff eat with the men.  The jailhouse turns into a nuthouse.  While a pair of hallucinating prison guards are distracted watching trash bins do a solarized dance to the Nilsson number “Living in a Garbage Can” (“the great garbage can is a tribute to the ingenuity of man”), Gleason and a cellmate fly away in an improvised air balloon.  Meanwhile, Carol Channing, dressed in tights and a pirate hat so that she looks like the illicit love child of Peter Pan and Captain Hook, leads an armada of flower children in a song-and-dance assault on God’s floating headquarters.  The scary thing is, she’s not tripping on LSD at the time.  Groucho escapes; his last words to the world are “pumpkin” as he takes a hit off a roach clip.  There are a pair of weddings, with the Skipper (George Raft) reading the rites from Gabriel Vahanian’s “The Death of God.”  In an unforgettable touch, Harry Nilsson sings the closing credits in their entirety (trust me, nobody sings the line “executive assistant to the producer Nat Rudich” like Nilsson).

So, at the end of Skidoo the existing order has been entirely overturned, replaced by a freakocracy.  The hippies even depose the ultimate authority figure—God, revealed to be a venal mobster, a paranoid germophobe, and a dirty old man.  The healing powers of psychoactive intoxicants have reconciled Tony Banks to his family and helped him escape from the metaphorical prison of his “nine-to-five bag.”  Borscht-belt comedians and longhaired pumpkin-smokers strut together arm-in-arm, in peace and harmony.  As Groucho might say, “very groovy.”  And, if you can’t dig that, then you probably don’t like chicken on Sunday.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… something only for Preminger-watchers, or for people whose minds need pressing by a heavy, flat object.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“It is so blatantly weird and in such marvelously bad taste that it feels as if Preminger was prescient on the pending rise of underground counterculture comedy such as John Waters and Cheech and Chong.”–Film Threat (screening)

“…a weird, weird film from 1968… This movie goes strange in 17 ways…”–Richard von Busack, Cinematical (retrospective)

IMDB LINK: Skidoo (1968)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Skidoo (1968) – Overview – TCM – The Turner Classic Movies Skidoo page contains the standard information, but also hosts 6 clips from the movie including a large part of Gleason’s LSD trip

Acid Test: The curiosity of Otto Preminger’s Skidoo – Jonathan Rosenbaum’s article on Skidoo‘s re-release contains a wealth of background information and is probably the most serious and in-depth analysis of the film available online

On the “Skidoo” set with Otto Preminger – A contemporaneous report from the Skidoo set by a young Roger Ebert (mostly focused on Otto Preminger’s irritability)

In the Windmills of SKIDOO (1968) – Entertaining essay on Skidoo and LSD by Erich Kuersten, whose blog/magazine Acidemic covers LSD in cinema (and more)

DVD INFO: The Olive Films release (buy) disappointingly contains no extra features (not even the film’s multiple trailers).  Still, we should be thankful that someone decided to release this important (if embarrassing) piece of cinematic history—basically unseen for over 40 years!—at all.

A Busy Day features Charlie in drag, trying to disrupt a parade in a shameless rip-off of his previous Kid Auto Races At Venice.  A Fatal Mallet also stars Sennett (a rare appearance, and for good reason—his acting is more uneven than his directing) fighting with Charlie over girly girl Mabel.  They are both dull Sennett products exhibiting little craftsmanship or art.

The Knockout is a half hour long, an epic for Keystone.  It is basically a Fatty Arbuckle boxing vehicle with Charlie coming between prize fighter Fatty and Edgar Kennedy.  Chaplin’s ballet-like brand of slapstick (barely) salvages the film, and The Knockout again makes it abundantly clear why Chaplin quickly outshone his peers.

Mabel’s Busy Day is an eccentric step up.  Mabel is the much put upon, unkempt hot dog vendor at a race track.  Charlie, as a dandy, arrives amidst much shenanigans, including dance-like slapstick with some Keystone Kops.  Charlie spies the patrons abusing poor Mabel.  He comforts her and, when her back is turned, he steals her hardware to go into business for himself, with predictably disastrous results.  Chaplin here is without sympathy, even if he ends up as abused as the girl he himself abused and, realizing what she has been put through, finds enough pity for her to accompany her through the iris out.  Again, the odd chemistry between Charlie and Mabel inexplicably works, although Chaplin would find more apt female counterparts later in his career.

“Laughing Gas” (1914, unrestored)

Chaplin co-wrote Mabel’s Married Life with Norman and, although Sennett officially directed, it is moving towards the style film historians will later term “Chaplinesque”; it is easily the best of the Sennett-directed Chaplin Keystones.  Charlie and Mabel are a married couple out on a Sunday promenade in the park.  Charlie grudgingly shares his banana with the Mrs.  He momentarily steps into an inn, which gives Mack Swain ample opportunity to stop and flirt with Mabel.  The little fellow doesn’t have much substance compared to big Mack.  Mack’s wife (Eva Nelson) arrives in time to put a temporary stop to the antics of the trio.  Charlie blames Mabel and sends her home, which gives him plenty of time to return to the bar.  On her way home, Mabel buys a life-size dummy (?) from a shop.  When the store’s delivery boys arrive with the dummy, Mabel is embarrassed to be caught only in her PJs (it is 1914).  She wraps a leopard skin rug around her torso and sends the boys packing.  While Mabel engages in balletic slapstick with her new boy toy, Charlie is engaged in slapstick of a more, inebriated violent nature with Big Mack and locals at the inn.  Worn out by the dummy, Mabel jumps into bed.  Charlie staggers into their apartment and predictably mistakes the dummy for Mack.  Charlie’s fight with the dummy is classic Keystone.  When he believes Mabel has been unfaithful, Charlie starts straggling her, much to the horror of eavesdropping neighbors.  The dummy gets in a few more whacks at both Charlie and Mabel before she pulls off the dummy’s hat, much to Charlie’s amusement.  Charlie and Mabel end their silly fight with a kiss.

Laughing Gas was written and directed by Chaplin, and with him now fully in control, we see a vast improvement over the previous Keystone efforts. This is a frantic, delightfully amoral short with the Tramp as a janitor for a dentist, and he’s particularly cruel to his employer’s patients and to a dwarf assistant (Joseph Sutherland).  Charlie’s boss is Dr. Pain (Fritz Schade) and Charlie is not above flirting with Mrs. Pain (the underrated Alice Howell, a favorite of Stan Laurel’s).  On the way to the pharmacy Charlie knocks out Mack Swain’s teeth with a flying brick, thus giving Dr. Pain yet another customer (Chaplin later reworked that business in his debt feature, 1921′s The Kid, he and Jackie Coogan intentionally throw bricks through windows to drum up paying customers for their glass replacement business).  There is quite a bit of erotic interplay between Charlie and Alice, then between Charlie and patient Helen Carruthers, whom Charlie takes advantage of when he takes pliers to her nose in order to plant a kiss on her lips.  Charlie steps on customers, brutalizes them, mocks clergymen, and clearly only cares for the pretty girls.  He is an unrepentant hedonist (a fact which predictably endeared this incarnation of the Tramp to many of the Surrealists).

The Property Man is the first two-reeler solely written and directed by Chaplin. He plays a prop man at a vaudeville theater. Charlie likes to drink beer backstage, smoke cigarettes, bark orders, and brutally abuse his elderly, Quasimodo-like assistant (Josef Swickard).  Charlie gets kicked around by the Strong Man (Jess Dandy), but Charlie, in turn, callously kicks his assistant in the face.  Charlie flirts with the Goo Goo Sisters (Vivian Edwards and Cecile Arnold) and cleverly utilizes the stage props in numerous slapstick gags.  Mack Sennet shows up as a patron who boos the bad acts and cheers the (unintentional) funny man Charlie.  Chaplin would later rework and draw out this idea in The Circus (1928).  The chaos climaxes with Charlie taking a hose to all, another gag he would revisit in the inferior A King in New York (1957).  Despite the crudeness, Chaplin’s sharpening skills paint him as our protagonist.

The Face on the Barroom Floor is an oddity in the Chaplin Keystone cannon.  It is a satire of the Hugh Antoine d’ Arcy poem, telling the tale of an anti-social vagabond who strolls into a tavern and (after spitting on the ass of a sleeping patron?!?) solicits multiple drinks from the local sailors as he recounts his fall from grace.  Through flashback Charlie narrates his life as a successful painter (painters were a lifelong source of romantic fascination for Chaplin), ruined when his love (Cecile Arnold) runs off with his model (Jess Dandy).  The d’ Arcy poem is quoted throughout the short, and Chaplin contrasts the tuxedoed painter with the filthy, dejected vagabond.  The painter unwittingly sits on his palette, eats his paint, and sullies his clothes.  As the vagabond, Chaplin obsessively sketches the image of his lost love on the tavern floor, but, in his drunken state, he only manages a shoddy smiley face.  Violent barroom antics ensue when the locals try to kick him out.  The vagabond collapses, falling face down in his own drawing (in the poem, the vagabond falls down dead).  Barroom Floor is not so much a comedy as a brief, dramatic sketch in which Chaplin’s screen persona acknowledges and celebrates being an annoyance.  Although Chaplin’s acting here is more advanced than in the earlier efforts,this is a film which would have benefited from the nuanced pathos of later Chaplin.  Still, it’s an interesting, ambitious attempt to break free of formula.

Recreation is another park comedy, in badly deteriorated condition.  The Tramp is suicidal until a pretty girl (Helen Carruthers) happens along.  Charlie’s newfound zest for life gets short-shifted when her sailor boyfriend and the Kops come along to spoil things.  It all ends with brick throwing and everyone in the lake.

In The Masquerader Chaplin and Arbuckle start off, as themselves, in a typical day at the film studio.  Fatty inexplicably vanishes after Charlie transforms into the Tramp and the cameras roll.  Charlie flirts with a couple of dishy tomatoes, misses his cue, and gets sacked by the callous director.  What’s a Tramp to do?  Charlie dons his best Mrs. Doubtfire, gets a job as an actress, and flirts with the boys before his ruse is discovered and he winds up at the bottom of a well!  Since it’s a one-reeler, there is no real time to milk the potential (Chaplin will do that in Essanay Studio’s 1915 A Woman), but this is a resplendent sketch.

Two Sinatra-styled duets:  His New Profession teams Chaplin with Charley Chase.  Chaplin is looking through the Police Gazette in the park when Chase hires the Tramp to look after his inconvenience: a wheel-chair bound uncle, thus freeing Chase to tend to a pretty girl.  Chaplin wheels the annoying crippled guy around the pier.  The Tramp wants a beer and steals money from another annoying crip.  Predictably, chaos escalates with the two paraplegics engaging in wheel-chair slapstick, and Chaplin trying to steal Chase’s girl.  Throw in a couple of Keystone Kops and bodies falling from the pier and this winds up as a representative example of early cinema anti-PC amoralism. The Rounders is Chaplin’s only genuine teaming with Arbuckle, and that is regrettable because they make a charismatic pair.  Charlie and Fatty are a couple of married rounders.  Charlie is married to the abusive dyke Phyllis Allen, while Fatty abuses Minta Durfee.  Al St. John and Charley Chase make cameo appearances, but it’s Chaplin and Arbuckle who serve as rudimentary precursors to the Laurel and Hardy brand of team comedy.  The scenario is thin, but primitively amusing.  The two disdainful hubbies pair up for a night of the town and much pouring of liquor.  The wives will come a-hunting; the boys will find refuge in a park and a sinking rowboat.

The New Janitor has a more intricate plot.  Charlie is a janitor working in a bank firm.  One of the junior managers (John T. Dillon) is being blackmailed for unpaid debts, and plans to steal money from the vault to pay off his blackmailer.  Meanwhile, Charlie gets fired for dumping a bucket of water onto the bank president (Jess Dandy).  Bank employee Helen Carruthers catches Dillon in mid-thievery.  She yells for help.  Charlie, on the verge of clearing out, hears her, foils the robbery and gets mistaken for the thief.  The real culprit is finally revealed and Charlie is rewarded with a raise.  Chaplin would remake the film, as The Bank (1915), at Essanay Studios.  Chaplin’s later trademark sentimentality is in evidence here, albeit subdued.

Those Love Pangs pairs Chaplin with Charles Conklin again as rival mashers, fighting over a bevy of women.  First they compete over their landlord (Helen Carruthers), then reliable Keystone regulars Cecile Arnold and Vivian Edwards (as prostitutes!).  The girls prefer Conklin, which prompts suicide attempt by Charlie, put a stop to by a Kop. Chaplin winds up with the girls and, of course, it ends in chaos at a local cinema.  Chaplin alone makes it watchable with idiosyncratic vignettes which have nothing to do with the narrative.  He perfects his cigarette kicking here and turns his cane into a toothpick.

Dough and Dynamite is another two-reeler and became the biggest hit among Chaplin’s Keystone films. Charlie is a waiter who outdoes himself in his abuse towards a customer.  He and fellow waiter Conklin are forced into the kitchen when the bakers go on strike.  Naturally there is frantic slapstick hijinks aplenty, but it’s Chaplin’s slower paced characterizations that make this a Keystone stand-out.  He turns dough into bracelets and rings, and with powder on his hands he intentionally and unintentionally gets his floury hands on the daily duties of several dames, including the boss’ wife (Norma Nichols).  Big boss man (Fritz Schade) sees Charlie’s handprint where it don’t belong, and it ends in an apocalyptic, dough-slinging finale.  The boys are unaware that the striking bakers have planted dynamite in a fatal loaf, and at the end the war-weary Tramp emerges from a sea of bread, bricks and mortars.

Mabel was back with Chaplin in Gentlemen of Nerve and, although a nominal film, it is good to see them together again.  Charlie is Mr. Wow Wow who, with Mr. Walrus (Mack Swain) sneaks into the track.  Charlie spies a pretty girl with a soda, plops down next to her, and steals sips.  Mabel is saddled with the roving eyes of Charles Conklin; eventually she winds up with the more appreciative Chaplin.

Chaplin is a piano mover in His Musical Career, a precursor of sorts to Laurel and Hardy‘s Music Box (1932).  It’s exactly what you would expect, with Charlie having an extremely rough go of it, ending up in a lake.  Laurel and Hardy improved on the subject, but Chaplin’s influence on the later film is undeniable.

His Trysting Places is a two-reel ensemble piece and all the better for it.  Chaplin and Mabel are a not so blissfully wedded couple.  She is stuck with the cooking and the infant.  She hands the baby to Charlie who takes the tyke in arm like an old suitcase.  Charlie clearly can’t be bothered with the brat, and hands his son a real pistol to play with so he can read the paper uninterrupted.  In striking contrast, we see the happy domesticity of Mack Swain and Phyllis Allen.  Chaplin edits these sequences like a string duet, and laces it with swelling cynicism.  Charlie and Mack run into each other in a nearby restaurant, and there is a scene with them fighting over food, including a chicken leg (prefiguring their starvation scene in Chaplin’s masterpiece, The Gold Rush, in which Mack imagines Charlie to be a chicken).  On their way out of the ensuing chaos, Charlie and Mack mistakenly grab each other’s coats.  In Mack’s coat is a letter, to his wife, suggesting a romantic meeting at their trysting place in the park.  In Charlie’s coat is a list for baby’s grocery needs.  Naturally, Mabel finds Mack’s letter in the coat she believes belongs to Charlie.  Convinced her husband is having an affair, she wallops him and then goes to find the other woman at the rendezvous spot.  At the park, Phyllis discovers the grocery list in her husband’s pocket and is convinced he is hiding an illegitimate child.  It all plays out like an identity mix-up from “The Marriage of Figaro.”

Charlie and Mack do a wife swap in Getting Acquainted.  Here, Charlie is married to Phyllis and Mack is married to Mabel.  This movie is noteworthy as the last teaming of Chaplin and Normand.  It all takes in the park, and the respective husbands are ambitious about dropping their wives to flirt with other girls around.  A Kop from the flirting patrol tries to quell the Don Juan syndrome.  The usual park slapstick is present, but it’s subdued for a Keystone comedy, and there is a prevailing farewell sentiment hovering over the film.

His Prehistoric Past was Chaplin’s final film for Sennett, and it sounds far more promising than what it actually delivers.  Chaplin dreams he is strolling through a prehistoric park.  Mack Swain is a rival neanderthal.  It could have used a Raquel Welch or a dinosaur or two.

Tillie’s Punctured Romance was Keystone’s first feature, and the first feature comedy film of any kind.  Although made before Getting Acquainted, it was released several months later.  The star here is Marie Dressler, who also starred in the Broadway musical on which the movie was based.  Chaplin, as a city slicker, steals everything but the camera.  Mabel is Charlie’s ex, and knows that Charlie is after Marie because of a potential inheritance from her rich uncle.  The Keystone Kops are also on hand, and although feature length slapsticks usually outstay their welcome, Tillie does not (neither do most of the Abbott and Costello features, or any of the Three Stooges movies).

“Chaplin at Keystone” also features a 1916 animated French short, Charlie’s White Elephants, which crudely pays homage to Chaplin and Arbuckle.  “Inside the Keystone Project” is a documentary which follows the painstaking, eight year restoration of the films.

Chaplin perfected the short film format during his stay at Mutual Studios.  Many critics consider his Mutual shorts to be his best.  There is much to be found as well in the Essanay shorts, made between Keystone and Mutual.  Keystone co-stars Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle would each have tragic falls from grace, while Chaplin went onto unparalleled success.  Indeed, he is almost the only silent star whose films are still regularly revived.

PLOT:  I’m not really sure…  see below.

COMMENTS:  I’m not at all being snarky in regards to being completely unable to wrangle out an explanation of the plot of Vixen Highway 2006: It Came from Uranus.  As far as I can gather, after multiple watchings, there are several strands of story involving (a) the escape of three female prisoners, (b) a female cop/bounty hunter, Divine Otaku (Amabelle Singson) who’s dispatched to capture the fugitives, all of whom have a fixation on (c) Rock legend Bobby Barzell, who’s waiting for a liver transplant to save his life and his ass from (d) Osiris (Tony Watt), an Alien Overlord who struck a bargain with Barzell for fame, money and sex in exchange for Barzell’s soul, and now who’s en route to Earth to collect.

Even more confusing is finding out that this film is an homage/reboot/requel to 2001′s Vixen Highway, written & directed by John Ervin (who co-wrote VH 2006), which apparently is a more straightforward version of the above storyline (probably without the alien overlord, I suspect).

Vixen Highway 2006: It Came from Uranus is a lo-budget, meth-fueled cousin of the NBK (Natural Born Killers) Aesthetic.  This movie starts at the level of overkill, and then goes balls out turning everything up to 11.  Everything is Too Much: too much on the sound fx, which goes way past cartoonish; the visual tricks, such as wipes, transitions, split screens—I think that all of the plug-ins of the editing program were used at least twice; the homaging and references, which are so thick, it’s like the filmmakers just poured everything from every grindhouse/exploitation/cult/faux-blaxploitation/mondo movie they liked into the pot; and IT’S TWO AND A HALF HOURS LONG!!

Some may see these as good things, I realize.  Frankenpimp (the director’s previous film) suffers from the same problems, only worse since it’s THREE HOURS LONG!!!  VH:2006 at least has that tiny, tiny bit of restraint… But Too Much for Way Too Long feels like you’re being mentally bludgeoned if you try to take it all in at one sitting.  The only way I got through both films was to take a little at a time—20-30 minute screenings.  The best way to experience the films may be in the background at a party, where you sample the film in bits and pieces and you’re not hammered relentlessly by the constant overkill, and not bothered by the slow movement (or lack of movement) of the narrative.

Tony Watt’s website

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this film was provided by the production company for review.

FEATURING: Richard Joseph Paul, Andrew Divoff, Jimmie F. Skaggs, a parade of C-list all-stars

PLOT:  Many years from now, on a faraway planet, a one-eyed alien villain comes to the frontier

outpost of Oblivion to raise a ruckus and murder the sheriff in cold blood.  It’s up to the sheriff’s empathic, violence-shunning son to assume his father’s mantle and save the day.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: A sci-fi/Western mashup has an inherent level of oddity, and the casting is genuinely off-the-wall, but in the end, Oblivion is really just a Western rehash dressed up with some futuristic elements in an effort to make it seem more unusual than it is.

COMMENTS: Years before Cowboys and Aliens would take up the task of blending, um, cowboys and aliens, Oblivion would stake its claim, opening with a magnificent beauty shot of a familiar looking Western landscape, into which zips a nifty flying saucer. Once a snake-skinned alien emerges and kills a creature that looks like the furball from Captain EO just to make a point, we’re well on our way.

The town this villain stalks into sure looks like the Wild West: dusty streets, men in long coats and Stetsons, a stockade in the middle of town. Make no mistake, it’s the future, with such touches as a robot deputy, laser pistols, a rare and powerful substance called draconium which has reduced gold to a pittance, and giant scorpions roaming on the outskirts of town. Oh, and ATMs. ATMs of the Old West.

Exploring one genre through the conventions of another is a time-honored tradition, but that’s not what Oblivion is up to. This movie is really just a Western with science fiction elements pasted on to make it feel different. But having done that, all the clichés are still the same. For example, when the sheriff lays down his poker hand before a showdown, it can only be aces and eights–a dead man’s hand. The fact that you’re seeing the cards on a handheld LCD screen doesn’t reinvigorate the cliché. It merely dresses it up in new clothes. Much of Oblivion is like this: something outwardly strange, but quickly revealing itself to be something quite ordinary.

If the movie’s not as weird as it wants to be, that’s not to say it isn’t odd. It’s just that the bulk of the strangeness seems to have originated in the office of the casting director, where a remarkable ensemble of semi- and not-quite-stars was assembled. The list includes Jackie Swanson, Woody’s girlfriend Kelly on “Cheers,” as a hard-bitten frontier merchant (pulling off the hard-bitten part about as well as you expect of Kelly from “Cheers“ ); Meg Foster, the love interest from They Live, playing the town’s robot deputy as though channeling Blanche from “The Golden Girls”; Julie Newmar, “Batman”’s longest-serving Catwoman, cast in the role of the town saloonkeeper, named (wait for it) Miss Kitty.  Even Isaac Hayes shows up (although never in the frame with anyone else) doing what seems to be a Jack Palance impression.  Best of all, there’s giant Carel Struycken (in a hilariously tall hat, given his already-tremendous height) as the town’s angel of death, uttering more lines than he probably has in his entire career.  It’s hard to imagine what led the filmmakers to put so much dialogue in the mouth of an actor best known for playing Lurch in The Addams Family.  Struycken is game, even if none of the lines flow easily from his lips.  It’s a cast selected by the “Family Guy” manatees.

Which is why it’s a real tribute to George Takei that he somehow manages to out-overact everyone in the film in his role as a falling-down drunk doctor/robot repairman with a thick Southern drawl.  From his first moment onscreen, when he staggers into frame hoisting a bottle of whiskey and declares, “Jim Beam me up!” it’s clear that he’s playing on a level all his own.  (This is but the first of a host of horrible “Star Trek” puns that, according to IMDb’s trivia section for Oblivion, screenwriter Peter David blames on ad-libs by Takei.  Even if true, this does not let David off the hook for a Schlitz beer joke that is possibly the worst moment in the entire film.)

Oblivion is not without its charms. Given that most of the sci-fi touches are exactly that—touches—the art and set direction from Colin de Rouin and Nicki Roberts is actually quite clever and well-deployed.  Little touches like ceiling fans suspended from towers in the middle of town add a lovely touch of unfamiliarity, and a red-and-blue siren mounted over the door of a traditional wooden sheriff’s office is amusing. Kudos, too, to composer Pino Donaggio, whose score is respectful of the Western genre, rather than pillaging it.

Ultimately, however, nothing much happens in Oblivion.  After Redeye—the only alien in Oblivion, by the way, save for a couple creations from the creature shop—kills the sheriff, his goals as conqueror are not terribly clear, and he’s in no hurry to achieve them.  He and his gang vandalize the general store, torture the hero’s native sidekick, and just generally make a nuisance of themselves.  Once our hero finally decides to saddle up and pursue the miscreants, there’s only a brief battle before Redeye ends up in the pincers of the night scorps, and the audience is treated to the most shocking sight in the entire film: a title card reading “To Be Continued.”  So little story, and they still couldn’t be bothered to finish it in one film.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…for all that it lacks it makes up for with its general ridiculousness. This is a movie I would put on if I were trying to show someone just how insane low budget movie-making had become during the early part of the nineties.”–Joshua Samford, Varied Celluloid (DVD)

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: Astron-6

FEATURING: Adam Brooks, Conor Sweeney, Matt Kennedy, Mackenzie Murdock, Amy Groening, Lloyd Kaufman

PLOT: A crazed cannibalistic killer goes after fathers in his rape/murder spree.  One-eyed

assassin/maple syrup maker Ahab, young priest Father John Sullivan, paranoid streetwalker Twink, and mystery-solving stripper Chelsea all seek revenge, teaming up for a strange and scattered mission.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: An eye-patched vigilante, a topless stripper with a chainsaw, a nearsighted cannibal rapist, incest, demonic possession, trips to both heaven and hell, a non sequitur commercial for low-budget sci-fi “Star Raiders,” hallucinogenic berries: Father’s Day has a lot of weirdness to recommend it. It starts off as a fairly standard (and insanely gory) grindhouse throwback, but evolves into a bizarre and fantastic adventure that just might be weird enough for the List.

COMMENTS:  Known for their impressive output of horror and comedy shorts, Winnipeg-based collective Astron-6 combines DIY filmmaking with a sick sense of humor and unadulterated love for 80′s straight-to-video schlock.  After making a trailer for the fake exploitation flick “Father’s Day,” Troma offered the group $10,000 to produce a full-length feature of the concept.  At the start it seems like a standard, and completely gruesome, grindhouse throwback with grisly close-ups of penis mutilation and sickening rape/murders set alongside over-the-top character archetypes and an enthusiastic score.  As Ahab (Adam Brooks), Father John (Matthew Kennedy), and Twink (Conor Sweeney) team up in the wake of several close-to-home father murders, it begins to take a turn for the ludicrous and eventually plunges into all-out wacky fantasy, seeming to forget its initial narrative and stylistic leanings—and becoming better for it.

With real pig intestines, buckets of fake blood, and a well-laid green screen, Father’s Day maintains a dark, grungy aesthetic that works well with its 70′s appropriations while exuding DIY innovation that sets it apart from some of its peers.  Steven Kostanski’s stop-motion hell creations and an extended trip around the world for Father John are among the many segments that vary in style and tone.  There’s even a goofy commercial for a fake Star Wars rip-off thrown in about two-thirds of the way through (the feature itself is introduced as a “midnight movie” tv program).  Astron-6 seems to have hundreds of ideas and little interest in streamlining, resulting in a surprisingly dense 99 minutes as myriad references, off-kilter jokes, side-trips, and subplots arise and descend.  Luckily, most of them work, but the ones that don’t result in some unevenness, especially in the overall tone.  The noticeable shift towards the middle is somewhat jarring, but not a dealbreaker.

Father’s Day may be sick and twisted in many ways, but it manages to be most of all fun.  The Astron-6 gang looks like they’re having a blast just being silly together as the plot becomes more and more ridiculous.  The whole cast is great, injecting equal amounts of parody and imagination into their roles, and I especially enjoyed the main three male leads, who have excellent comedic chemistry.  The film’s biggest flaw is its tonal inconsistencies, but for many viewers the inclusion of so many ideas and exploitation references will likely be appreciated.  Astron-6 decided to really go all-out for this film, and by holding nothing back they will impress many and alienate those who wouldn’t get it anyway. And I have a feeling they’re fine with that.

Father’s Day official site.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“With a surreal plotline, exceptional acting, a host of hilarious one-liners, and a large, beautiful cast of many many almost naked women this is one highly recommended giggle & gorefest you really shouldn’t miss.”–Rick McGrath, Quiet Earth (festival screening)