FEATURING: Noah Segan, Andrea Renda, Jon Budinoff, Ricardo Gray, Silvia Spross, Ezzra [sic] Buzzington, Elina Madison

PLOT: The spirits of two possessed serial killers who rape their victims to death stalk drug

abusing medical students.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  If you want unlikeable, unbelievable characters and prosthetic mutant penises, this is your movie; if you want something scary or meaningfully weird, however, look elsewhere.

COMMENTS: The strangest thing about Someone’s Knocking at the Door isn’t the variety of killer genitalia on display, but the bed-hopping, skin-popping residents of what has to rank as the Princeton Review’s number one medical party school.  Besides engaging in frequently fatal kinky sex, these medicos in training spend most of their time taking speed, booze, ecstasy, nicotine, Xanax, Oxycontin, nitrous oxide, and attending Halloween parties where the students egg each other on with cries of “chug! chug! chug!”  Fortunately for the kids, when one of their compatriots is killed via graphic demonic anal rape, the school’s hippie chancellor gives them the week off to grieve at the kegger of their choice.  The students also get high off of vials of experimental psychiatric drugs, while listening to snuff audiotapes so they can catch up on the back story.  (Only after shooting up do they think to look up the drug’s side effects, which include increased sexual appetite, hallucinations, and possible coma.  Oops!)  In a stroke of good luck for the audience, the kids are all perfectly detestable human beings, which means we don’t mind much when possessed serial killers from the 1970s somehow show up to rape them to death.  Jon Budinoff, in particular, never says a kind or sincere word and punches his dates when they don’t put out; he’s so loathsome it’s impossible to believe he could have any friends at all.  On the other hand we recognize Noah Segan as the film’s moral conscience when he objects after finding his socially inept buddy groping a half-nude, comatose female partier who may have stopped breathing (although he’s not so judgmental as to try to stop him).  Knocking is a movie that would love to be offensive, but it keeps tripping over its own silliness.  Ridiculous plot and lack of characterization aside, the movie is technically competent, and director Chad Ferris does put some interesting and occasionally very weird ideas up on the screen.  All of the backgrounds are earth tones or sickly avocados; the film has the color scheme of a 1977 kitchenette.  The genital prosthetics are genuinely nightmarish (the film focuses on the phallus, but the other sex gets its moment to, er, shine as well).  Psychotic episodes are effectively conveyed through stuttering editing that mixes alternate views of the present with brief hallucinations, scored to eerie electronic noises.  At one point, the sound effects even mimic a malfunctioning dial-up modem, a scarier effect than you might think.  And, look closely at the funeral procession for an unexpectedly bizarre surprise.  Other odd moments include a fleeing female who falls a modern record seven times (!) while covering a mere ten feet as she’s chased by a shambling but sure-footed killer.  (In her defense, she may have been thrown off by the fact that the soundtrack was blaring an upbeat indie rock tune instead of the expected shrieking violins).  Add a twist ending you’ve seen before and a strong moral against injecting experimental psychiatric medications for kicks, and you have a strange, if uneven, modern exploitation horror.  If grindhouses existed today, this is what would be playing there.  A mixture of time-tested horror clichés, careless scriptwriting, and mucho grotesquerie, Knocking features enough sex, violence and general outrageousness to save it from being boring, and enough stylistic innovation to (mostly) camouflage its derivative slasher story.  Fans of modern disgusto horror will open up gleefully for Someone’s Knocking at the Door, but others will want to turn off all the lights and pretend no one’s home.

A title credit sequence featuring a vintage shower of pharmaceuticals cut with grainy 1960s home movies announces that this is a movie aimed squarely at the horror/stoner crowd, the genre’s largest unacknowledged demographic.  In a clever exploitation-style marketing move, the poster and DVD cover features black censor bars not only over exposed naughty bits, but also over the actors’ and actresses’ eyes, giving the movie an extra aura of pornographic depravity.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…eschews the standards of the youth-horror genre, opting instead for something more hallucinatory.”–Michael Gingold, Fangoria (DVD)

DIRECTED BY: Tom Martino

FEATURING: Howard Calvert, Jamelle Kent, Matt Rogers, Kerryn Ledet, Danny McCarty, Joe Grisaffi

PLOT: Baking Soda & G.E.D., a pair of misguided drug dealers, find themselves out of

customers when a new group of traffickers invade their hood with an alien form of smack. With only their friend “Kreech Da Black Kreecha from a Lagoon” at their side, the two crack heads—armed and ready—must fight their way back to the top.

COMMENTS: When I first saw the poster for Race War: The Remake, my first thought was that it was probably going to be the best part of the movie… your opinion may well vary.  But, if your taste runs towards Tromaesque spectacle and you have an ample supply of beer and bongloads to get you through the running time, then this will definitely make your weekend!

There’s some talent floating around in this bowl: Calvert and Kent make a decent pair of stoner badass heroes (with Calvert radiating a Rudy Ray Moore vibe), and the effects are decent.  Most of the other cast members hide under masks or disguises so embarrassment is not an issue here. What works against the film is mostly the past 30 years or so of Troma-type grossout humor and movies that a good portion of the audience has been exposed to.  There’s nothing new here. Which, if you’re calling your film Race War, means that a good opportunity has largely been wasted.  There’s still room for some biting racial comedy with no limits to step up and become the modern day equivalent of a Blazing Saddles or even a Darktown Strutters.

But this ain’t it.  At best, this is a group of friends screwing around on several weekends to make a party film… which, for some, ain’t bad, if there’s enough alcohol and weed around.  For others, it’s more like, ‘been there, done that”.

DWN Productions – Official site

DIRECTED BY: David Cronenberg

FEATURING: Jeremy Irons, Genevieve Bujold

PLOT: A woman disturbs the delicate psychic balance between twin gynecologists.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: When the plot synopsis contains the words “twin gynecologists,” you know you’ll be traveling into territory off the beaten path.  When it’s David Cronenberg directing a story about twin gynecologists, you can expect something even further out there.  While Dead Ringers is a drama, it’s a drama for horror movie fans, and it’s offbeat and unnerving enough that it might in indeed rise to the level of “weird.”

COMMENTS:  Twins can be mildly eerie.  Male gynecologists are slightly creepy.  Put twins and gynecologists together, though, and the ick factor increases exponentially; especially when the twin gynecologists’ dating practices are, to say the least, highly unethical.  As shy Beverly and suave Elliot, the Mantle twins, Jeremy Irons gives a fascinating and multifaceted performance.  By utilizing differing mannerisms and energy levels (Bev is jittery where Elliot is detached), Irons makes it so the viewer can immediately differentiate which twin is which about 80% of the time.  That 20% uncertainty about who you are looking at on the screen adds an extra uneasy edge to a picture that’s already morally queasy.  Bev and Elliot, you see, share their women—who are also their patients—and the ladies may be bedding Bev while believing they’re receiving Elliot.  When Beverly, the more sensitive of the pair, becomes enamored with a French-Canadian actress/patient, he decides he wants to keep her for himself and pursue a normal male/female relationship.  But these psychic Siamese twins have become accustomed to share every experience, professional and erotic, since childhood, and asserting his independence proves traumatic for Beverly.  He slides into drug abuse and professional disgrace, and drags codependent Elliot down into the sewer with him.  Cronenberg keeps the explicitly weird elements to a minimum.  There’s a dream sequence, but perhaps the film’s oddest feature is the fact that, rather than using the traditional reassuring white scrubs, the twins perversely outfit their surgical staff in uniforms of blood red—the color of alarm.  Though it’s played straight (for a Cronenberg film), there’s a murky psychological undertone to the incidents that makes Ringers unsettling even beyond its unsavory subject matter.  Cronenberg directs crisply, with sharp cinematography on elegant sets that ironically underscore the seediness of the proceedings.  Stiff Brit Irons lends a touch of class and even manages to make the unsavory twins sympathetic as they spiral to a professional and personal nadir of barbiturate withdrawal psychosis.  Irons performance nabbed Best Actor awards from the New York and Chicago film critics associations and a runner-up prize from the LA film critics, but the project was too strange to be endorsed by the Academy Awards, which procrastinated until the following year to recognize the actor for his role as accused murderer Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune (Irons credits Dead Ringers for an “assist” in nabbing him that statuette).  Despite the paucity of plaudits, this may be the greatest portrayal of twins by a single actor in movie history, making this unusual and extremely dark film worth a look even for conventional cinephiles.

As strange and implausible as Dead Ringers scenario might seem, it’s actually loosely based on a real-life case.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Who, then, will be drawn to this spectacle? Anyone with a taste for the macabre wit, the weird poignancy and the shifting notions of identity that lend ‘Dead Ringers’ such fascination.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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

FEATURING: Peter Weller, Amiri Bakara, Jello Biafra, David Cronenberg, Allen Ginsberg (footage), Iggy Pop, Genesis P-Orridge, Patti Smith, Gus van Sant, Andy Warhol (footage), John Waters

PLOT:  A portrait of the life of the literary outlaw told through archival footage, rare home

movies, and interviews with friends, admirers and followers.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Its subject is weird, but despite the brief avant-garde sequences used as buffers between the praising heads, its method isn’t.

COMMENTS:  With his quick wit, cadaverous features, and patrician drawl, William S. Burroughs projected a mighty persona.  His writings were full of ironic distance, parody and outlandish stream-of-consciousness surrealism, only occasionally punctured by confessional.  The romantic myth that grew up about him—the artist tormented by guilt, addiction, and public ostracism, who strikes back at society by rejecting all forms of authority—was so powerful that it became far more influential than his actual writings.  The subtitle of this documentary—A Man Within—suggests that we may get a peek under that dapper three-piece armor Burroughs wore in public and see the real, naked man underneath.  Yony Leyser’s freshman documentary is partially successful at that task; he gives us unprecedented access to Burroughs’ home movies (showing him as an old man smoking a joint before going out to fire a shotgun) and reminiscences from those closest to him, including several former lovers.  The portrait that emerges is of a man who may have suffered as much from loneliness as from drugs and remorse; the man we see here has difficulty forming relationships with men he’s attracted to, and prefers to seek the companionship of street hustlers and boys too young and foolish to break his heart.  Topics covered, in jumbled order, include Burroughs’ upper class upbringing; his role as godfather of the Beats; his homosexuality and his refusal to join the “gay mainstream;” his lifelong relationship with heroin; his love of snakes and guns; the accidental killing of Joan Vollmer while playing a drunken game of “William Tell”; Naked Lunch and its censorship battles; his troubled and tragic relationship with his son (who drank himself to death in an attempt to emulate and impress dear old dad);  his second role as spiritual godfather, this time to the punk rock movement; and his declining years, when he appears to finally find some peace.  There’s even time for a little bit of Burroughs’ actual writing: his hilariously cynical Thanksgiving wish (“thanks for the American dream to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through”) and a few excerpts of the author’s delightfully dry readings of his own works.  Still, a neophyte watching this documentary will come away with little sense of Burroughs’ actual literary importance; for example, he’ll still have almost no idea what Naked Lunch was about (although to be fair, the same could be said of someone who’s read the novel several times).  Bolstering the doc’s weird credentials are a series of bizarro bumpers between interviewees: animated wire frame sculptures used to introduce chapters, manipulated and superimposed stock footage, what looks to be a segment from an archival experimental film featuring Brion Gyson’s trippy spinning light “Dream Machine,” and snippets from 70s-80s era punk-surrealist music videos incorporating Burroughs’ image and mystique (one of these, “Rub Out the Word” by Roger Holden, is included as an extra on the DVD).  Sometimes footage is chopped up with Burroughs speaking a few words at a time, then jumping to another part of the monologue, cut-up style.  All in all, these intermediary sequences give the documentary an arty, bohemian feel that’s in complete harmony with its subject.  Musical accompaniment is provided by Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, and traditional Moroccan Sufi trance music from the Master Musicians of Jajouka.  Have no doubt, this is an encomium and not an exposé or unbiased examination of Burroughs life.  All interviewers are friends and admirers, and no one has an unkind word to say about the master.  (For a man who went out of his way to offend and provoke everyone, it appears Burroughs made remarkably few enemies; or perhaps he just outlived them all).  What may be the central event of Burroughs life—the homicide of Vollmer, a killing for which the writer was never punished outside of his own head—is almost glossed over.  To make the hagiography complete, Waters officially canonizes Burroughs in the movie’s finale.  It’s more tribute than documentary, and as such will be well-received by fans, worshippers, and those inclined to become fans and worshippers.

William S. Burroughs has links to two Certified Weird movies.  Besides the obvious Naked Lunch connection, his hipness was harnessed when he was chosen to narrate the edited version of Häxan that toured college campuses in the late 60s as Witchcraft Through the Ages.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Beat novelist and poet, junkie, expatriate, homosexual, lousy shot, punk-rock godhead, scenester, weird old man, and more, the subject of Yony Leyser’s very capable documentary ‘William S. Burroughs: A Man Within’ carried multitudes inside him, despite the film’s title.”–Ty Burr, The Boston Globe (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Gaspar Noé

FEATURING: Paz de la Huerta, Nathaniel Brown

PLOT: Oscar is a drug-dealer living in Tokyo with his stripper sister.  One day he is shot and killed during a deal inside a bar called “The Void.”  He spends the rest of the movie as a silent ghost, floating around Tokyo and observing his sister and friends, while simultaneously hallucinating and remembering the details of his life.

BACKGROUND:

• Noé wrote preliminary scripts for Enter the Void as early as 1994; the screenplay was consider to expensive to produce until the director’s 2002 success with Irréversible made it appear commercially viable.
• Star Nathaniel Brown, a non-actor, was chosen because of his physical resemblance to lead Paz de la Huerta and because he was interested in directing.  As someone with no acting ambitions, Noé presumed Brown would not be upset by the fact that his face is only seen once in the film, briefly in a mirror.
• Visual perfectionist Marc Caro supervised the set designs.
• The 100 page script indicated the action and described the visual effects, but very little dialogue was scripted; the actors improvised most of their lines.
• The paintings Alex is shown working on in the film were actually painted by Luis Felipe Noé, the director’s father.
• The original run time of the film at its Cannes debut was 163 minutes.  Post production and editing continued after this debut, and, as completed in 2010, the final run time of the film (which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, 2010) as screened in the U.S. is about 140 minutes.  There is a longer version of the film, however, including a 17 minute sequence where Oscar believes he has woken up in the morgue; this segment occupies reel 7 of 9 reels, and for American screenings the film was simply shown with reel 7 omitted.  The extended cut is available on French DVD releases.
• Noe instructed theaters that the film should be run at 25 frames per second rather than the usual 24 frames (this fact accounts for some of the discrepancies in listed running times).
• At the Cannes premier there were no opening or closing credits.  The film began on a closeup of the none sign reading “enter” and ended with the words “the void.”
• Noé got the idea for the film form watching Robert Montgomery’s noir The Lady in the Lake while on a magic mushroom trip.  Like Enter the Void, Lady in the Lake is filmed entirely from a first-person point of view (actually, in Void the POV is usually from about a foot behind Oscar’s head, though at other times we see events through his eyes).
• Tokyo was chosen as the location of the film partly because Japan’s strong ant-drug laws would make the actions of the police more believable, partly because Noé believed the city, with its abundance of neon, had a “druggy mood.”
• Pioneering acid guru Timothy Leary used to read “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” to voyagers undergoing LSD trips in an attempt to steer the experience in a spiritual direction.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The opening DMT trip, with it’s multicolored mandalas, floating planetoids, and neon tentacles seems hard to top, but it merely sets the mood.  It’s the pornographic “Love Hotel” scene, with its parade of rutting couples with mystically glowing genitalia, that really impresses itself on the mind’s eye.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: As the most impressive and eye-splintering acid trip movie of the

Original trailer for Enter the Void

decade (by a wide margin), Enter the Void gets an automatic pass onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of All Time.  The fact that the protagonist is dead throughout most of the movie doesn’t hurt its chances one bit.  But the clincher, the sure sign that the movie is weird, is the walkouts.  Less than halfway through the screening I saw, the sexagenarian couple who had stumbled into the film by accident (probably thanks to ad copy suggesting the movie was a sentimental ghost story about brotherly love that transcends death) walked out of the theater, leaving me alone with two same-sex couples with facial piercings and hair that glowed in the dark.

COMMENTS:  Enter the Void is an exploitation piece masquerading as an art installation, eye-candy masquerading as mind-candy; it has all the reckless visionary enthusiasm and delightful audacity of a Ken Russell picture.  With the opening credits—a series of garish, frequently unreadable stills sprayed at the screen like pop bullets from a machine gun projector, set to a pounding techno score—Gaspar Noé warns us to prepare ourselves to see something different, though we have no idea what.  After quickly introducing the main characters, drug-dealing Oscar (from whose POV the entire film is shot) and his stripper sister Linda, the movie segues into a wordless five minute DMT trip, an abstract rainbow odyssey of swirling, melting mandalas and gently waving tentacles.  Oscar emerges from his drug reverie, still fuzzy-eyed, and the film ever so briefly enters the realm of straightforward narrative as he strolls with a drug buddy through the neon streets of Tokyo towards a fatal rendezvous.  Shot to death in a men’s room, the vast bulk of the movie involves Oscar’s passive postmortem adventures, as he floats around the city observing his former friends in the expatriate community, and especially spying on his beloved sister—including, creepily, watching her real time sexual encounters.  Gradually, flashbacks of his life intrude on his disembodied observations, and the movie’s storytelling becomes even more fragmented and experimental.  Although his memory occasionally slips and merges with hallucination—characters change, as when a young Oscar walks in on his parents having sex, and the man plowing dear old mom suddenly sports the face of his best friend doing sis—attentive viewers won’t have much problem piecing together the backstory, which deals with Oscar’s betrayal as well as the vow he and his sister made as children to always stay together after the death of their parents.  The story is serviceable, and served well by slicing it up into bite-sized tidbits; if the tale had been told straight from beginning to end it would be too bland and familiar to choke down in this quantity.

Paz de la Huerta, who after following her role as the aptly named “Nude” in The Limits of Control with this sexy ecstasy addicted stripper is quickly becoming weird movie fans’ favorite pin-up girl, delivers her melodramatic blowup scenes with great conviction.  Despite portraying the protagonist, amateur Nathaniel Brown seems hardly in the movie; since the audience’s view is through a camera positioned about one foot behind him, we only see the back of his head and hear his voice, and for most of the movie he is a silent ghostly presence.  Neither actor stands the slightest chance of upstaging the apocalyptic neon visuals, which are the film’s obvious reason for existing; the camera is the real star, and thanks to the POV style it actually plays the main character, as well.  The movie is basically two hours of drugs and sex, and of druggy sex—especially in the jaw dropping pornographic finale—and perhaps thirty minutes of recycled hippie spirituality, delivered with arch insincerity. Whether you find the mystical glowing genitalia of the orgiastic climax laughably pretentious or ethereally erotic, you’re not soon likely to erase these sights from your mind.  

Visually, Enter the Void is unconditionally stunning, and the movie is best and most honestly enjoyed on a purely sensory level, as the most technically accomplished and accurate documentation of a psychedelic journey ever filmed. The abstract pyrotechnics of the opening trip set up the visual motifs that will recur through the rest of the movie’s voyage: the fluorescent color scheme, the floating perspective, the tunnel vision and sense of being drawn into a circle of light at the center of the field of vision. Every environment in the film is deliberately over-saturated, continually bathed in Tokyo’s neon glow. When Oscar and Alex take a midnight stroll to The Void, the glowing signage makes the night as bright as day, except that the color schemes continually shift from lime to red to peach, depending on which neon font they’re walking past at the moment. Linda’s strip club glows a lustful purple when she’s onstage, changing to a lurid rose for her sex scene. Alex’s friend’s art installations radiate sapphire and ruby jewel tones. The Love Hotel is indigo and orange, with pink and yellow highlights. Even the memory flashback scenes have odd coloration, with unexplained red or golden auras. Every frame of the movie is re-tinted using artificial hues and luminosities. The everyday world is stained in the afterimage of the hallucinatory one; Enter the Void is like staring at a never ending fireworks display.

The floating and tunnel vision motifs first seen in the trip become the primary visual scheme Oscar’s death. Central concepts of the near-death-experience myth are that you become detached from the body and float outside it, and that you die when you “enter the light” at the “end of the tunnel.” Oscar’s astral journey through Tokyo is accomplished through some amazingly long and fluid crane shots; the camera appears to drift through walls, spying on one compartment after another until the camera finds something of interest and swoops in for a closer inspection. The technical mastery of the cinematography here is awe-inspiring; the effect on the viewer is disorientation in space as well as in reality, the feeling of drifting out of one’s own body. Time and time again, at the conclusion of a scene the camera will pick out some circle in the background and dive into it, transitioning into the next vision. We travel into a light bulb on a ceiling, a bullet hole (as in Performance), an ashtray, a burner on a stove top. In each journey we move towards a dot which grows into a tunnel, and when it consumes our field of view we’re treated to strobe effects and mystical abstract visuals that bring that DMT trip back to mind, before we’re spit out into the next scene. The floating into a tunnel motif meets its apex in the penultimate scene, in which we travel inside the human body to into a microscopic world that looks like it has been sculpted by psychedelic substances in a journey into what appears to be a giant planet trailing fuzzy tendrils.

In one form or another, computer-generated imagery was used on almost every frame of the film (if for nothing else but color correction), and Enter the Void is the most artistic use of a technology so far that’s usually employed only to flesh out ranks of troops in battle sequences or to create more “realistic” looking monsters. But although it’s a trippy tour de force and a true brain-bending experience, the film is far from flawless: most obviously, at over two and a half hours it’s way too long for its minimal storyline, even after Noé trimmed 45 minutes (!) from the final theatrical cut.  Although the camerawork impresses, there’s only so much floating through the streets and alleyways of Tokyo that one person can take, several dramatic scenes seem to repeat themselves, and even the brilliant psychedelic sequences would punch harder at a shorter length. 

Furthermore, although we’re supposed to root for Oscar and Linda because of their vows of sibling love, and because they have only each other to turn to in a foreign land, it’s hard to sympathize with the suffering of these adult orphans, since they clearly bring their troubles on themselves with their deliberately sleazy life choices. Linda is petulant and vacuous; if she has depths beyond her need to simulate a family with her brother, they’re not explored. We get to know Oscar much better, but almost wish we hadn’t. He seems a bit dull—he’s unable to grasp the concepts in The Book of the Dead, which his brighter friend Alex patiently explains to him for the audience’s benefit—but maybe the problem is that he’s too stoned to concentrate for long enough to grasp simple concepts. At one point he stresses the importance of having goals in life, but demonstrates none himself, except the desire to scarf every drug he can get his hands on and get inside the pants of every attractive woman he sees. His vision of paradise seems to be a hotel where his friends and acquaintances engage in an eternal orgy. He sleeps with a friend’s mom. seduces formerly innocent Japanese girls with cocaine, and introduces his own sister to ecstasy.

Speaking of sis, their entire relationship is tinged with not-so-subtle hints of incest. Oscar is jealous of other men who pay sexual attention to her, and swears if she gets pregnant by her current beau he’ll kill the baby (he appears to get his wish in the unnecessarily gruesome abortion scene, which treats us to the unlikely sight of Linda’s bloody fetus left lying around in an aluminum hospital pan). He watches her strip and give lap dances; he makes love to women who are strippers, like her. He sniffs her g-string. While disembodied, he twice floats into the position of a man who’s making love to Linda, staring into her eyes as her face contorts in passion. For her part, Linda encourages his unnatural passions. When she first arrives in Japan, he takes her out on a “date” and shows her the sights; they ride a roller coaster, and she kisses him on the neck and sucks his earlobe in a very un-sisterly display of emotion. She gets drunk, juts out her breasts and asks, “Have I grown? I look like a woman now?” (Of course, all these events could just be Oscar’s wish fulfillment fantasies as he lays dying). Beyond shock and provocation, it’s not clear what the entire incest subtext/subplot is supposed to add to the film; it doesn’t mesh with the film’s broader themes of illusion, death and rebirth. It certainly highlights Oscar’s emotional and psychological immaturity—he’s unable to separate love from sex in his mind—but it also perverts and detracts from the purity of their sibling pact, which is the only positive trait either of the two principals ever show.

Finally, the insincerity of the story’s stab at spirituality rubs me the wrong way. When I first saw the film I thought that Noé was trying to create an ambiguous milieu; we could choose to believe that Oscar was really going through the process of reincarnation as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or we could decide it was all his dying hallucination. (Such a structure would be analogous to, though less beautifully executed than, the ambiguous ending of Pan’s Labyrinth). The afterlife of the film seems constructed to illustrate either hypothesis. Further reflection and review, and the director’s own words in multiple interviews, have convinced me that the hallucination angle is the only viable interpretation. DMT, the drug that Oscar smokes at the beginning of the film, is possibly the most powerful psychedelic known to man, and is also produced in trace amounts in mammals (it’s unknown if it has an evolutionary function, or is just a byproduct of some other biochemical reaction). Some scientists have speculated that DMT is dumped into the bloodstream at the time of death, producing the effects reported as “near death experiences.” This speculation is presented in the film as scientific fact by Alex, the film’s wisest and most intelligent character; and as described above, Oscar’s post-expiration hallucinations bear a remarkable similarity to the visions he sees under the influence of the drug: the floating, the tunnel vision, the journey into the light. Oscar’s centerpiece hallucination in the Love Hotel takes place not in the real world, or in a spiritual way station, but inside a model built by one of his artist friends, using a sexual conceit that he himself dreamed up one day; it’s inextricably linked to his particular consciousness, not the Universal Consciousness. The film’s final shot is unexpected and undercuts the reincarnation thesis, while supporting the hallucination/near death experience theory (one explanation, though almost certainly a fallacious one, of the tunnel of light phenomenon in NDEs is that it’s a remembrance of traveling through the birth canal). And, if we needed more proof as to the fact that Oscar simply ceases to be and never gets reincarnated, we need only look to the movie’s title.

Many of the movie’s fans, especially younger ones, have embraced the spiritual explanation of the film; everyone wants to believe in immortality, and the sentimentality of the notion that Oscar would reincarnate to fulfill his pact with his sister is understandably appealing. (Of course, those who embrace this interpretation will probably miss the irony that, according to Buddhism, reincarnation is a punishment, not a reward, and Oscar’s extreme attachment to his sister is the primary cord holding him back from reaching Nirvana). But I have to imagine that the atheistic Noé is secretly laughing up his sleeve at those who buy the spiritual interpretation. It’s hard to escape the nagging feeling that, when it comes down to it, Enter the Void is nothing more than a celebration of the romance of an aimless, amoral drug culture, and the exotic mystical notes it hits are offered only as hypocritical justifications for the hedonism on display.  The movie’s point seems to be: death is the greatest trip of all, and religion is the most awesome of hallucinations.  It’s only moral value is as a cautionary tale: don’t be like Oscar. Enter the Void won’t send most youngsters scurrying off to the library to learn about Tibetan Buddhism, but it might send them scurrying off to the nearest nightclub to pop pills, screw around, and hope that tonight’s the night they get to die young.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Not clever enough to be truly pretentious, Noe’s tiresomely gimmicky film about a low-level Tokyo drug dealer who enjoys one long, last trip after dying proves to be the ne plus ultra of nothing much.”–Rob Nelson, Variety (Cannes screening)

“One hundred proof unfiltered weirdness.”–Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star-Tribune (contemporaneous)

“…if you yourself are stoked for a lurid, oversexed, stupid-with-Freud Midnight Movie extravaganza – a trip to El Topo via Mulholland Drive – there are worse ways to spend 2 1/2 hours… The film is by turns self-conscious, ludicrous, maddening and yet exhilarating – yes, there’s no getting around it, we can’t keep our eyes off the screen – exhilarating.”–Stephen Cole, The Globe and Mail (Toronto) (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITES:

Enter the Void – impressively designed site with trippy graphics, but it may take a while to load up.  Contains numerous high quality stills and the pressbook (like the rest of the site, in French).

Enter the Void – IFC Entertainment – IFC’s English-language distributor’s page contains more stills and three short expository clips from the film along with the trailer

IMDB LINK: Enter the Void (2009)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Cannes Pressbook – The pressbook consists of a long and reveling interview Noé.  In .pdf format.

Anatomy of a Scene: ‘Enter the Void’ – There is no director’s commentary on the Enter the Void DVD, but Gaspar Noé did provide comments for the New York Times for this quiet 2 minute scene with Paz de la Huerta

TribecaFilm.com | Features | Enter the Void: Gaspar Noé – Brief analysis of the film by Zachary Wigon, incorporating quotes from the director

Gaspar Noé’s Trip Into the “Void” – The director discusses the films, and the drugs, that influenced him with IFC

Gaspar Noé Interview: Enter The Void, illegal substances and life after death – Another interview with the loquacious Noé; in this one, he reveals his views on religion

Turn on, Tune in to a Trippy Afterlife – Profile of the director’s career and Enter the Void‘s place in it from The New York Times‘ Dennis Lim

Enter the Void Made by FX – Fxguide’s interview with Geoffrey Niquet, Enter the Void‘s film’s visual effects supervisor

Contemplating a Colorful Afterlife – Technical article on the film’s cinematography from the October 2010 issue of American Cinematographer.  The article begins on page 18.

Suddenly The Maelstrom: Gaspar Noé On The Music Of Enter The Void – Commentary on the film’s soundtrack from The Quietus.

DVD INFO: Like the movie itself, the IFC DVD release (buy) is packed with extras which are high on stylish visuals but low on exposition and insight.  The disc contains about 10 minutes of deleted scenes (none of which would have added much to the film).  The DVD also delivers an overdose of trailers: there’s the French trailer, the wordless “world” trailer, the US trailer, eight teaser trailers (some fairly pornographic), and three unused trailers.  (That’s fourteen separate trailers, not counting the numerous previews for other IFC titles!)  “VFX” is an interesting, but ultimately frustrating featurette that shows some of the films visual effects, but with no commentary or explanation of what we’re seeing.  We see the original scene, and then a wipe reveals what the scene looked like before color correction, or shows a grid overlay that suggests how the creators might have rendered a CGI version of the scene for a particular visual effect (you can imagine how this kind of thing might be necessary when the camera is supposed to “dive” into a pot on a stove and dissolve to the next scene, or to flesh out a model of the Love Hotel).  An explanation of how the effects were achieved would have been welcome; this feature presents itself almost as just another trip sequence.  Speaking of trips, two separate DMT-inspired fractal sequences are included, a five minute lightshow titled “Vortex” and a 2 minute “loop” titled simply “DMT.”  These two segments would work well set to repeat and played as wallpaper at a party.  The title sequence is itself so psychedelic that some super-stoned viewers might fumble the disc into the player and sit there hypnotized at it as it plays endlessly without ever watching the movie.  All in all, its an impressive package, as long as you’re not expecting insight into the thought processes behind the film.

Enter the Void is also available in Blu-ray (buy) with the same features.

True Void devotees with access to Region 2 or multi-region players may want to track down the French DVD/Blu-ray releases instead, which includes the extended cut of the film.

DIRECTED BY: Gaspar Noé

FEATURING: Paz de la Huerta, Nathaniel Brown

PLOT: A small-time drug dealer in Tokyo is shot, and spends the rest of the movie as a

hallucinating ghost, floating about the city watching over his drug buddies and his grieving stripper sister.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: As the most impressive and eye-splintering acid trip movie of the decade (by a wide margin), Enter the Void gets automatic consideration for the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies.  The fact that the protagonist is dead throughout most of the movie doesn’t hurt its chances one bit.  But the clincher, the sure sign that your movie might be weird, is the fact that less than halfway through the screening the sexagenarian couple walked out of the theater, leaving me alone with two same-sex couples with facial piercings and hair that glowed in the dark.  The Region 1 DVD drops January 25, 2011, at which time Enter the Void will become eligible for the List and get an immediate second look.

COMMENTS: Enter the Void is an exploitation piece masquerading as an art installation, eye-candy masquerading as mind-candy; it has all the reckless visionary enthusiasm and delightful pretension of a Ken Russell picture.  With the opening credits—a series of garish, frequently unreadable stills sprayed at the screen like pop bullets from a machine gun projector, set to a pounding techno score—Gaspar Noé warns us to prepare ourselves to see something different, though we have no idea what.  (The original festival screenings did not include any credits, beginning immediately with the closeup of the neon sign reading “Enter”).  After quickly introducing the main characters, drug-dealing Oscar (from whose POV the entire film is shot) and his stripper sister Linda, the movie segues into a wordless five minute DMT trip, an abstract rainbow odyssey of swirling, melting mandalas and gently waving tentacles.  Oscar emerges from his drug reverie, still fuzzy-eyed, and the film ever so briefly enters the realm of straightforward narrative as he strolls with a buddy through the neon streets of  Tokyo towards a fatal rendezvous.  Shot to death in a men’s room, the vast bulk of the movie involves Oscar’s passive postmortem adventures, as he floats around the city observing his former friends in the expatriate community, and especially spying on his beloved sister—including, creepily, watching her real time sexual encounters in the back room of the strip club where she works.  Gradually, flashbacks of his life intrude on his disembodied observations, and the movie’s storytelling becomes even more fragmented and experimental.  Although his memory occasionally slips and merges with hallucination—as when a young Oscar walks in on his parent’s having sex, and the man plowing dear old mom suddenly sports the face of his best friend—attentive viewers won’t have much  problem piecing together the backstory, which deals with Oscar’s betrayal by his drug buddies as well as the vow he and his sister made as children to always stay together after the death of their parents.  The story is serviceable, and served well by slicing it up into bite-sized tidbits; if the tale had been told straight from beginning to end it would be too bland and familiar to choke down in this quantity.

Paz de la Huerta, who after following her role as the aptly named “Nude” in The Limits of Control with this sexy ecstasy addicted stripper is quickly becoming the weird movies favorite pin-up girl, delivers her melodramatic blowup scenes with great conviction.  Despite portraying the protagonist, Nathaniel Brown seems hardly in the movie; since the audience’s view is through a camera positioned about one foot behind him, we only see the back of his head and hear his voice, and for most of the movie he is a silent ghostly presence.  Neither of the actors stood the slightest chance of upstaging the apocalyptic neon visuals, which are the film’s obvious reason for existing; the camera is the real star, and thanks to the POV style it actually plays the main character, as well.  The movie is basically two hours of drugs and sex, and of druggy sex—especially in the jaw dropping pornographic finale—and perhaps thirty minutes of recycled hippie spirituality.  Whether you find the mystical glowing genitalia of the orgiastic climax laughably pretentious or ethereally erotic, you’re not soon likely to erase these sights from your mind.

Though it’s a trippy tour de force and an unforgettable brain-bending experience, the film is far from flawless; most obviously, at over two and a half hours it’s way too long for its minimal storyline, even after Noé trimmed 45 minutes (!) from the final theatrical cut.  Although the camerawork is impressive, there’s only so much floating through the streets and alleyways of Tokyo that one person can take, several dramatic scenes seem to repeat themselves, and even the brilliant psychedelic sequences would punch harder at a shorter length.  Furthermore, although we’re supposed to root for Oscar and Linda because of their vows of sibling love and because they have only each other to turn to in a foreign land, it’s hard to sympathize with the suffering of these adult orphans, since they clearly bring their troubles on themselves with their deliberately sleazy life choices.  Finally, the story’s stab at spirituality seems insincere; it’s laid on so pompously that one hopes it’s insincere.  It’s hard to escape the feeling that the movie is little more than a celebration of the romance of an aimless, amoral drug culture, and the exotic mystical notes it hits are hypocritical justifications for the hedonism on display.  That may actually be the movie’s point; death is the greatest trip of all, and religion is the most awesome of hallucinations.  Enter the Void won’t send most youngsters scurrying off to the library to learn about Tibetan Buddhism, but it might send them scurrying off to the nearest nightclub to pop pills, screw around, and hope that tonight’s the night they get to die young.

DMT, the drug that Oscar smokes at the beginning of the film, is possibly the most powerful psychedelic known to man, and is also produced in trace amounts in mammals (it’s unknown if it has an evolutionary function, or is just a byproduct of some other biochemical reaction).  Some scientists have speculated that DMT is dumped into the bloodstream at the time of death, producing the effects reported as “near death experiences.”  This speculation is mentioned in the film (where it’s presented as scientific fact), and some of Oscar’s post-expiration hallucinations bear a remarkable similarity to the visions he sees under the influence of the drug.

Noé premiered a 3+ hour version the film at Cannes in 2009, but considered that long version to be incomplete, and post-production continued for almost a year.  The final director-approved cut, running 154 minutes, premiered at Sundance in 2010.  Therefore, although the movie bears a 2009 copyright, it may be more appropriate to consider it a 2010 release—which would make it eligible to be named “the weirdest movie of 2010.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“One hundred proof unfiltered weirdness.”–Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star-Tribune (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Werner Herzog

FEATURING: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer

PLOT: While investigating the slaughter of an immigrant family, a pill-popping and coke-

sniffing New Orleans cop’s penchant for gambling and for rolling his escort girlfriend’s clients gets him into deep trouble with his department and with dangerous men; to save his life, clear his name, and crack the case, he must pull off several double crosses while strung out and sleep deprived.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Watched with a doggedly literal mind, this version of Bad Lieutenant could almost be seen as a straightforward thriller/police procedural, but most who check out this flick will come away with the nagging feeling that there’s something exceptionally strange afoot in NOLA these days.  Less than a handful of hallucinations dog our drug-soaked antihero through the port, but the visions that do appear pack one hell of  a wallop.  Cage’s jittery, over-the-top performance and the enigmatic, dreamlike ending Herzog supplies notch two more points in the “weird” column.

COMMENTS: In 1992 underground auteur Abel Ferrara made a notorious movie about a corrupt New York City cop who shoots heroin, smokes crack, molests teenage girls, shakes down criminals for bribes, and tries to solve a case involving a raped nun while hallucinating and dodging a bookie he owes an unpayable debt.  Bad Lieutenant was an overwrought, magnificent Christian parable that sought to demonstrate God’s infinite capacity for forgiveness by presenting a character that audiences couldn’t forgive.

In 2009 renowned German auteur Werned Herzog made a movie about a corrupt New Orleans cop who snorts heroin, smokes crack, molests young women over the age of 21, rolls johns for drugs and money, and tries to solve a case involving a murdered family while hallucinating and dodging a mobster he owes an unpayable debt.  Herzog defiantly claimed never to have heard of Ferrara or the first Bad Lieutenant movie, but screenwriter William M. Finkelstein notably kept his mouth shut.

It’s a good thing that Herzog, who apparently wanted to title the film Port of Call New Orleans, relented and let the producers include “Bad Lieutenant” in the title, because it defused almost certain criticism that the story was a Bad Lieutenant ripoff and put critics instead in the mindset of focusing on the ample tonal differences between the two movies.  Many reviewers even asserted that Herzog’s film has “nothing at all” to do with Ferrara’s, beyond the two depraved, over-the-top performances of Keitel and Cage.  Keitel spent his movie cursing, slurring and drooling, and is most remembered for kneeling in a church, mewling and spitting out half-formed epithets as he hallucinated a visitation from Jesus Christ.  His was a literally and figuratively naked performance; asked to be completely sincere, Keitel risked looking ridiculous.  Cage, on the other hand, never disrobes; he sleeps in the same rumpled tan jacket night after night (on the rare occasions he does sleep).  His jittery, disjointed, often deliriously hammy performance is like Hunter Thompson as assayed by Dennis Hopper on a meth binge.  Gaunt, bursting into laughter at dangerous times, imagining iguanas, and pinching off old ladies’ oxygen supplies during interrogations: Cage is clearly having fun being bad.  In Cage, Herzog figures he’s found his next Klaus Kiniski, a much mocked actor whose scenery-chewing proclivities he can turn from an embarrassment into an asset by matching him to mad material.  Nic even gets off what may be the best gonzo line of the decade: “Shoot him again!  His soul’s still dancing!,” delivering it with an unhinged spontaneous delight that it suggests an ad-lib (the accompanying visual, the movie’s most memorable, proves it ain’t).

The difference between Keitel’s Lieutenant and Cage’s is like the difference between a bag of uncut heroin and uncut cocaine: they’re both white crystalline powders that melt your mind, but you’d never mistake the effects of one for the other.  The tone in Port of Call: New Orleans is more detached and ironic than the bruisingly sincere New York film; at times, it’s a black comedy and a parody of a police procedural.  It’s hard to imagine an uneasy, ridiculous scene like the one where the iguanas appear to sing “Please Release Me” in Ferrara’s hellish Gotham.  At one point, the perpetually inebriated Cage find himself simultaneously toting around a dog, a kid, and a hooker with a heart of gold; it’s as if the script couldn’t make up its mind on a humanizing companion cliché, so it winkingly decides to cover all the bases at once.

Despite the lighter tone and the leavening humor, Port of Call New Orleans shouldn’t be mistaken for a comedy.  Cage’s Terrence McDonagh is a more complex character than Keitel’s nameless Lieutenant—who was little more than walking, fornicating, blubbering sin—and has a different character arc.  Bad as McDonagh is, he’s not thoroughly evil.  He’s given a backstory to explain his drug addiction and slide into cynicism, he shows loyalty to those closest to him, and he does have a legitimate devotion to solving the murder case.  The script highlights opportunities when he could have abused his legal authority, but chose to back off.  As he says, in an ethical double entendre near the end of the film, he “has bad days,” though more of them than most of us, to be sure.  McDonagh is an unexpectedly realistic character, a true antihero with a few virtues that we can root for even while we disapprove of him.  He’s a more nuanced and mature Lieutenant than the original, which is not to say a better one; each script chooses the correct spin to put on the character for that film’s purpose.

McDonagh needs a few redeeming characteristics, because the plot requires us to root for him.  He is, after all, ultimately on the side of justice, at least where his own crimes aren’t concerned.  The double-stranded story is surprisingly engaging.  The investigation of the massacre of the Senegalese family draws us in, but eventually McDongah’s own misbehaviors pile up on him and push that plotline into the background.  The drugs, the gambling debts, shaking down the wrong johns, the internal affairs agents sniffing around… McDonagh may have been able to juggle these issues for years, but they all come crashing down on his head at once at the worst possible time.  Cage’s cop sinks to the lowest level imaginable, into a septic hole with slimy walls that it should be impossible to claw his way out of.  Then, the script amazes us as, starting anew from nothing, playing off one faction against another and taking advantage of some outrageous good luck, he rebuilds his position.

By the end, McDonagh even ends up better off than he started.  Lest we think vice has been rewarded, he even decides to clean up his act—or does he?  True, the observing iguanas slither away into the bayou, but the Lieutenant he has his backsliding moments, his “bad days” when he rapes women in parking lots and holes up in a sleazy hotel room with a bag of heroin.  Still, the good fortune Cage strikes at the end of the film is so incredible, his immediate transformation so unlikely, that we can’t help but be reminded that Cage’s last good role prior to this one was in Adaptation, and we can’t help but wonder if the director is hoping we remember that role, too.  To puzzle us the more Herzog adds a highly enigmatic, “fishy” epilogue which concludes with a long shot of Cage and an unlikely companion sitting in front of an aquarium, as if lounging in the Mississippi by a pier once again submerged under Katrina’s waters.

The original Bad Lieutenant superficially ended on a downer, but there was no question about redemption: you either took the movie on faith, or you didn’t.  Herzog is agnostic as to whether salvation is possible, and won’t let the audience know for sure if the ending is grace or delusion.  Does Cage remain forever evil at heart?  Or was he ever truly depraved—that is, in the Biblical sense?  Ferrara knew the answer, and Herzog doesn’t; but they both make their case as well as it can be made.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…punchy, seriously strange (if less seriously essential) film… [Cage is] back in the resplendently weird form of films like Raising Arizona and Wild at Heart…”–Michelle Orange, Movieline (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Joe Dallesandro, Holly Woodlawn

PLOT:  All the women (and the men dressed as women) want hunky Joe Dallesandro, but

he’s impotent from shooting too much junk; he lives with a woman who furnishes their hovel with castoff items she finds left on Manhattan curbs for trash pickup, and the two dream of getting on welfare someday.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Though Trash is about weird people and has its “off” moments, it’s not quite weird enough for the List.  Trash was cutting-edge in style, concept and subject matter when it came out in 1970.  But in the forty years since its debut, the sad lives of lowlife junkies and social outcasts have been tapped many times, and Trash‘s casual, near-documentary approach (accurately) makes a drug addict’s life seem painfully banal most of the time.  Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol have collaborated on weirder projects.

COMMENTS:  Told in a pseudo-documentary style with partially improvised dialogue, on one level Trash is a gritty and realistic slice-of-life drama about deadbeat druggies on Manhattan’s lower east side.  It glides from meaningless episode to meaningless episode; Joe Dallesandro searches for his next fix and can’t get an erection no matter how many ladies try to seduce him; Holly Woodlawn keeps searching through the neighbors’ trash for stuff she can use, but she never finds any hidden treasure.  Their dreams are pathetically small but still far beyond their grasp, and by the end the conjoined losers end up exactly where they started.  Fortunately for us, plenty of weirdos drift into their lives in the meantime—a go-go dancer, a rich girl looking for an acid connection, an out-of-his-depth high school student, Holly’s pregnant sister, a welfare bureaucrat.  A few of these encounters are completely naturalistic, but most have an absurd edge to them.  Trying to turn Joe on, the go-go dancer breaks into a song and dance number, backed by swinging strands of Christmas lights on the stripper’s stage she has in her living room. The welfare functionary can’t approve a junkie for the public dole, but he’s willing to strike a fairly bizarre bargain to skirt the rules.  The weirdest sequence comes when Joe breaks into a house and is caught by the scatterbrained, bored woman who lives there; she isn’t frightened by the junkie burglar at all, but instead keeps him around and concocts a story about them being old high school friends for the benefit of her husband.  Half the people Joe meets get off on watching him shoot heroin, and so we are treated to multiple scenes where he actually ties off and sticks a needle into his vein: junkie porno.  The women who try to seduce him all have annoying, high, nasal voices—one has a speech impediment—and they all whine even during casual conversation.  The grimy strangeness makes it seem like we’re watching a reality that’s being filtered through Joe’s hazy, heroin-addled brain; the randomly scattered audio dropouts that mimic his opiate nods add to the effect.  Dallesandro had charisma, but he always was a pretty boy who never really learned to act no matter how many times Morrissey cast him.  Here, playing a permanently strung-out hustler, his lack of talent isn’t a problem: he spends the entire movie either repeating back what’s said to him or mumbling “Whaaa…?”, as if he really is stoned out of his gourd.  On the other hand, the transvestite Holly Woodlawn is a genuine surprise: not only does the performance convince you the he is a she, it can also be funny, angry, pathetic and oddly dignified.  Woodlawn’s never drag-queen campy, and you can see why Morrissey expanded her role from a bit part to co-star status: she conveys the street-wise, city-foolish attitude of the elective underclass (“I wanted to get back on welfare, be respectable…”)  Since Dallesandro’s too disconnected and unambitious to identify with, Woodlawn gives the story a center.

Trash is the second part of Morrissey’s unofficial lowlife trilogy: Flesh, Trash and Heat.  Compared to Flesh, which featured Dallesandro as a teenage hustler and male prostitute, Trash has less experimental flashes and more humor, and is a more watchable and better movie.  Historically, it’s an important film in the underground canon; today, Trash is interesting as much for its peek at the mindset and preoccupations of 1960s experimental filmmakers as it is for the story or performances.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…it’s aware of its own ludicrousness. It understands that it’s not to be taken seriously, or erotically. And there are some weirdly funny performances by Holly Woodlawn, a transvestite, Joe Dallesandro, Jane Forth and Michael Sklar. Morrissey has a muscular sense of the ridiculous.”–Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

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

FEATURING: Anne Carlisle, Paula E. Sheppard, Susan Doukas, Otto von Wernherr, Bob Brady

PLOT: Tiny aliens land their flying saucer on the roof of a New York City penthouse and

begin sucking the brains out of sex-addicted New Wave beatniks.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST:  Tsukerman’s filming style is free-form and unconventional.  Liquid Sky‘s visual footprint is every bit as avant-garde as its story about drug addicted extraterrestrials is bizarre.

COMMENTS:  Aliens come to Earth in search of a heroin rush.  It seems the little green, er, ah, terrestrially challenged ones don’t have the requisite opposing thumbs needed for handling a set of works, so they enjoy their smack the next best way: by telekinetically extracting the gray-matter of heroin addicts whose brains are flooded with opiates.  Wonderful though it may be, heroin turns out to be only a gateway drug for the saucer-jockeys.  While some human poppy-heads may find death to be the ultimate narcotic, the aliens soon discover that the endorphin rush in a juicy human brain during orgasm is the ultimate high, and they reset their priorities accordingly.

Now the gnarly little starmen seek out fornicators and harvest their orgasms for the best buzz.  Still guided by the scent of smack, the space-meisters dock their star-buggy on the roof of a penthouse shared by a drug dealer and her lesbian fashion model lover.  Their apartment contains a large amount of heroin, but better yet, is the locus of a lot of degenerate sex.

When the two gal pals aren’t waxing philosophic during their performance art exhibitions and dance routines at a local New Wave club, they are attracting a steady stream of addicted customers, androgynous jet trash, and depraved sex fiends back to their pad.  The astral hop heads make the most of the situation and suck hapless guests dry when they sexually relieve themselves.  Of course this kills each guest, but no matter.  A few dead bodies are an almost normalizing factor at these two girls’ crazy, drug-addled, day-glo, non-stop New Wave penthouse party.

A Berlin scientist who has been studying the aliens makes the scene and tries to rescue the girls before the little neuron nibblers absorb their whacked-out noggins as well.  The situation becomes a bit sticky when he discovers that the fashion model has plans of her own for the moonmen junkies.

Liquid Sky is a terribly dated, low budget film that is imaginatively colorful and oh so avant-garde.  While it looks pretty campy now, 1980′s hipsters affirm that at the time of its release, Liquid Sky was considered to be the coolest thing by New Wave standards since “smart drinks” and those wraparound mirrored “spectrums” Devo used to wear.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…one of the weirdest films you’ll ever see… The film redefines weirdness and randomness as it jumps back and forth between seemingly unimportant scenes in clubs where our characters, like deer stuck in headlights, dance away and fight off the advances of others.”–Ed Gonzalez, Apollo Movie Guide (DVD)