FEATURING:  Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson

PLOT: A small group of settlers faces an indefinite fate when they gamble their survival on the

veracity of two diametrically opposed guides, each of questionable character.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: On its face, Meek’s Cutoff appears to be a steady, plodding historical-fiction drama, a slow, tense tale about the perils of trust and the tedium of uncertainty. And it is…to an extent. But there’s something going on under the surface. When the film refuses to relinquish it’s heavy, solemn tone by employing a musical score or comic relief as the unrelentingly grim and heavy nature of the characters’ conundrum intensifies and hangs on our conscience like dead weight, and as the subtly surreal nature of the setting and the situation sinks in, the weirdness mounts. The effect combines the absurdist, futile tedium of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, the eerie sense of a malignant grand design of Yellowbrickroad (2010), and the pensive, serenely surreal atmosphere of Housekeeping (1987). The result is unique and unsettling.

The sudden, quietly shocking ending and the location in the story in which it occurs appalls the viewer with a sickening insight. This epiphany reveals that the movie is not about the drama which has been unfolding up to this point, or about how it is to be resolved, but that it concerns something entirely different. Upon grasping the filmmakers’ message, we realize we have had a genuinely weird viewing experience.

COMMENTS: From the first frame, it’s obvious that Meek’s Cutoff is a serious, authentic, carefully crafted story. As is the case with so many independent art films, a majority of viewers may reject it. Audiences who are pining for a reprise of Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider should skip Meek’s Cutoff and instead opt for something like True Grit. They will find Meek’s Cutoff  boring, and it’s climax confusing, unsatisfying and disturbing.

Viewers who enjoy artfully cerebral movies with ambiguous conclusions however, will like Meek’s Cutoff. The clever ending dramatically drives home the thrust of the film, revealing it to be much more than just a Western genre pic.

In Meek’s Cutoff, three families split away from a larger wagon train to follow a shady rogue scout named Stephen Meek. Meek promises them a quicker, safer route over the Cascades to Western Oregon. Once past the point of no return, Meek reveals himself to be unorthodox, incompetent, and possibly insane.

Vain, full of colorful, sophomoric bravado, nursing a penchant for savage violence, Meek gets the settlers completely and utterly lost on an endless, wasted plain. Desperate, running out of water, and coping with numerous potentially life threatening hardships, the pioneers form an uneasy alliance with a captured Cayuse brave.

Offering rewards, the settlers clamor to entice the warrior to lead them to water, squaring off with an inflamed Meek in the process. Meek tries to kill the Indian, claiming the Indian nearly precipitated a massacre when attempting to report the settlers’ presence to his tribe. The settlers suspect Meek is crazy. Has he been contracted by the Hudson Bay Company to deliberately maroon them in favor of French emigrants? Has the Cayuse tribesman been signaling to trailing warriors bent on overtaking the small wagon train? The homesteaders are split as to whom they can trust.

The three families find themselves at the mercy of two antagonists locked in mutual animosity. Will one man save them, or will both men damn them?

Eastern Oregon’s stark, high desert scrub wastes accent striking cinematography in this quietly tense, plodding, surreal story about faith versus uncertainty. Jeff Grace’s haunting, dreamlike score, combined with the alien setting, gives Meek’s Cutoff the feeling of an odyssey. Rather than shot, the picture seems almost engraved into the blanched, weathered rock and parched loam of the blasted landscape.

The desolate geography, at once romantic and forlorn, forms not only the backdrop for the action, but the backbone of the plot. It brandishes a chilling openness, contradicted by a claustrophobia achieved by the way its hills and dales obfuscate any possible sign of deliverance at the horizon. Recalcitrant, unforgiving, the desert is in collusion with the homesteaders’ nemeses, channeling the settlers to a vague and ambiguous fate. Trekking across an alien, vacuous landscape, the emigrants are like cosmic explorers; like spacewalkers attached to their capsules by an oxygen lifeline, the homesteaders are tethered to their Conestogas by the umbilical reins of their oxen. In this way, the harsh countryside is itself an antagonist, incipiently complicit with the story’s provocateurs.

Time seems to stand still during the families’ sojourn upon the featureless terrain. Progress is measured by reaching a horizon that only reveals yet another one beyond it. The significance of the settlers’ destination becomes subordinated to the minutiae of the routine actions and regimentation of the journey itself.

The minutiae are the journey, and the journey is the story. Repetitive tasks have a grounding effect, providing a measure of the day and a way to combat the disorientation of the wide open plain. Despite the expansiveness of the sky above, however, the travelers’ situation is often claustrophobic: dips, dales, and buttes obscure the view of their surroundings. It seems they are always looking up to the rim of a basin instead of out to the horizon. Long hooded bonnets and wagon covers become blinders.

Meek’s Cutoff can be reminiscent of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. Time dilates. Resolution fails to manifest. What was predicted to be a two week journey stretches to five. Meek perpetually promises that water is just over the next hill, but it never is.

It’s the conflict between Meek and the Cayuse brave, the ambiguity of the guides’ intentions, and the severity of the situation that distinguishes Meek’s Cutoff from an excruciating absurdist play. We want to see who is telling the truth, who is mad, who is sane, what will come from the animosity between the guides. The serenity of the plain is an illusion. The threat of sudden slaughter and annihilation lurks just beyond the edges of sage covered hillocks.

Meek’s Cutoff is about much more than a quest for water and safe passage. This is where its categorization as a “Western” proves troublesome. The film is an odyssey about trust, doubt and fatalism, its story related through a seamless ribbon of vignettes. These segments emphasize the challenge, tedium and visceral rawness of the daily survival struggle made by desperate people with limited resources and modest technology in a hostile environment. The matches of wits and elements of fate provide Meek’s Cutoff with a unique depth.The point is driven home by a strategic, unconventional denouement. Upon beholding its sudden, heavy, ambiguous ending, we realize Meek’s Cutoff is really about the monotonous hell of perpetual mortal uncertainty.

APPENDIX:

Loosely inspired by, but not based on an actual incident, Meek’s Cutoff is set in the year that a wagon train met tragedy in the central Cascades in what today is known as Meek’s Cutoff. The real life Stephen Hall Meek was born in Virginia in 1807. An experienced mountain man, he hired himself out as a trail guide to settlers traveling the Oregon trail from Independence, Missouri.

In 1845, Meek led 200 wagons, between 750 and 1000 settlers, and thousands of heads of cattle and oxen across the high plains west of Vale, Oregon toward the eastern slopes of the Cascades. Hoping to establish a more direct middle route through the region, Meek attempted to find a shortcut to Oregon City, by following the course of the Malheur River south and then west.

When the pioneers failed to locate water en route, they abandoned their westerly course, turning north. Sending out multiple search parties in a 25 mile radius, the settlers eventually located water at Buck Creek and the South Fork of the Crooked River. By the time Meek’s wagon train arrived in The Dalles in the Willamet Valley, some distance from Oregon City, at least 23 of the pioneers were dead. Weakened from their ordeal, an unspecified number died shortly after their arrival at The Dalles. (Karen Bassett, Jim Renner, and Joyce White. Meek Cutoff, 1845, [Oregon Trails Coordinating Council 1998]; Keith Clark and Lowell Tiller. Terrible Trail: The Meek Cutoff, 1845, [Bend, OR: Maverick Publications Inc., 1966])

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a film ponderously slow in pace yet kinetically charged with insight; starkly realistic yet allegorical too; psychologically astute yet politically resonant.”–Rick Groen, Toronto Globe and Mail (contemporaneous)

Actors Will Patton, Michelle Williams, writer Jonathan Raymond, and director Kelly Reichardt may be familiar to some viewers from the 2008 independent drama Wendy And Lucy.

FEATURING: Navin Pratap, Jamie Abrams

PLOT: An amnesiac man awakens in the post-apocalyptic future encased in a protective suit

and patrols the desolate landscape searching for explanations.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: With its microbudget aesthetic of abandoned barns and homemade black leather cyborg-suits, this sci-fi indie set on the post-apocalyptic Canadian prairie is nothing like a Hollywood movie; but the minimal story is not engaging enough to justify considering it for a List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of All Time.

COMMENTS: In a sense, it may be pointless to review Hellacious Acres. This is a movie that doesn’t care what you think of it; it just wants to be itself. It stars a character who wakes up trapped in a synthetic, computerized black protective suit without knowing who he is or why he’s there, and who ends up in a hallucinatory delirium without accomplishing whatever his goal was. In between, he consults his video-game console glove for info on the world around him, learns how to eat and expel waste through the hose attached to his suit, and walks, walks, WALKS. (The trailer takes a perverse pride in pointing out the amount of WALKING in Acres, as does the soundtrack, which launches into an epic, doom-laden sludgy drone whenever John Glass puts his heels to the prairie grass). Events play out in real time. When Glass needs to find something to eat, most movies would either skip the sequence or compress the action through editing; here, we watch every second of him searching every inch of an abandoned house, forcing his way into a stubborn cabinet, studying each label he finds, laboriously sawing through the tin can, then discovering the contents are rancid—and starting all over again with a new can. It sounds like a cruel joke on the audience, but Acres‘ subtle sense of humor about its own lack of pace helps win you over: that involuntary wince you give when you see Glass reach for that second can, or the way he throws up his hands in exasperation as he circles through a menu on his control panel while trying to arm his deadly plasma weapon in the middle of a melee. The effects are not that special but Tremblay has uses his minimal budget with maximum effectiveness; the faceless costuming is creepy, and the video-game interface looks futuristic enough for the film’s purposes. The blasted farmland setting, with its almost comical number of barns repurposed to house teleporters, is also novel; it’s a more laid-back, rural apocalypse than we’re used to seeing in the movies. Most importantly, there’s plenty of weirdness filling up the empty spaces: a psychedelic opening with a disembodied voice giving the backstory while we look at a heat-imaging map of the resuscitated John Glass, a mutant baby encased in a jar, Glass carrying around (and carrying on conversations with) the severed hand of a fellow soldier, bad trips caused by teleportation drugs, a hallucinated waiter of the wasteland, and of course the lightbulb-shaped alien energy jellyfish that now prowl the Earth. In a final spit in the face to storytelling conventions, the tale ends in futility, with the protagonist insane, having failed at a mission that was never really clearly explained, having learned nothing of importance about himself and having unlocked no significant mysteries about the strange world he found himself in. This whole exercise in perverse pacing and post-apocalyptic hallucination is likely to leave even weird movie buffs perplexed about what they’ve just seen; imagine how “normal” folks would feel if they rented this by accident looking for a straight sci-fi adventure?

Pat Tremblay‘s first film was the still-unreleased surrealist experiment Heads of Control: The Gorul Baheu Brain Expedition (2006). He was last seen at 366 trying to provide us with a top 10 weird movies list (he was unable to limit himself to just ten titles).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Hellacious Acres is bizarre… It really is one awkward flick that some folks may dig but others will blatantly hate.”–Ramius Scythe, Horror Chronicles (DVD)

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this movie was provided by the distributor for review.

FEATURING: Rick Crawford, Audrey Walker, Chris Witherspoon, Jo Black-Jacob, Richard Topping

PLOT: Dennis Twist (Crawford), an English professor/failed novelist who lives in the suburbs with

his wife Crystal (Walker) goes into Portland for a day to break off a clandestine relationship with his girlfriend, who has an ex-boyfriend just out of prison. A chance encounter with a motorcyclist quickly evolves into a twisted game of cat-and-mouse, and eventually escalates into rape and murder.

COMMENTS: Rage has gotten quite a bit of praise in various festivals over the year, and I’ll admit that it’s quite above average in the type of film that it is. That said, my own reaction to it is a bit less charitable—I feel that it would’ve worked much better as a half hour short, as far as twisting up the suspense level.  At feature length, what is meant to be building suspense just turns into tedious padding, once the set-up is established. There’s also (in my opinion) a fatal misstep in tone at the climax, where a character’s rape that is meant to be ugly and uncomfortable is immediately followed up by a gory murder which is played for laughs. It sort of undermines the ending — which, to me, didn’t come off as shocking as it was meant to be.

Rage worked for a lot of people, many of whom threw out comparisons to Steven Spielberg’s Duel. I wouldn’t go quite THAT far—for me, it worked for about 30 minutes, but the remaining 55 were unnecessary.

Rage official Facebook page

Rage trailer

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…really, really good—a tight, taut indie thriller with enough action, suspense and intrigue to fill three movies and an honest energy that makes you forgive its minibudget limitations… (The biker, incidentally, is essayed by Witherspoon himself. Think Darth Vader meets Ghost Rider meets the “Living Dead” from PSYCHOMANIA.)”–Chris Alexander, Fangoria (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: John Cameron Mitchell

FEATURING: John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor, Andrea Martin

PLOT: We first meet Hedwig as she and her band the Angry Inch are performing at a seafood buffet in Kansas City. In flashback, and in music videos, we learn that she was born a boy named Hans in East Berlin, and underwent a (botched) sex change operation so she could marry an American G.I. and leave for the West. Now, she and her band are shadowing the cross-country tour of Tommy Gnosis, Hedwig’s ex-boyfriend turned arena rock star, whom she accuses of having stolen her songs.

BACKGROUND:

• John Cameron Mitchell, then a professional stage actor, debuted the character of Hedwig in 1994 at a drag show at a punk nightclub in New York City. With the help of songwriter Stephen Trask, he built an off-Broadway play—originally staged in the ballroom of a fleabag hotel in Manhattan’s meat packing district—around the androgynous chanteuse.
• In the early drafts of the play Tommy was the main character and Hedwig a supporting player.
• Mitchell’s father was U.S. Army Major General John Mitchell, and the younger Mitchell spent much of his childhood in Berlin where his father was stationed during the later part of the Cold War.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Is it Hedwig’s androgynous Aryan visage, half-hidden under a pound of glittery makeup and a sculpted blond wig big enough to double the diameter of her head? Or is it the animated retelling of Aristophanes fable in “The Origin of Love,” with a squiggly line drawing of Zeus cutting the legs off whales? Fortunately, thanks to split-screen technology, we don’t have to choose; we can get Hedwig’s glacial glam mug on the left and a severed half-moon face yearning to swallow her up on the right together in one still.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Well, it does feature a rock star who’s the victim of a botched sex

Original trailer for Hedwig and the Angry Inch

change searching for love and vengeance and telling her life story through song while playing on a tour of discount seafood restaurants with her band of Eastern European refugee musicians, which is a plot you don’t see everyday. If that’s not enough to satisfy your weird desires, however, stick with it until the end, when it drifts into a dreamlike series of music videos that see characters swapping sexes and changing into other characters.

COMMENTS: He may not be widely acknowledged as the West’s weirdest philosopher, but Plato has inspired two of the most bizarre movies ever made. His “Allegory of the Cave” was the obvious inspiration for the cavelike reality of the children imprisoned by walls of words in Dogtooth. John Cameron Mitchell pays even more straightforward tribute to another famous Platonic metaphor in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. When Hedwig says, “It is clear that I must find my other half, but is it a he, or a she?” it’s an explicit reference to the myth of love proposed by Aristophanes in Plato’s “Symposium.” In Plato’s account of the contest by Athens’ best and brightest to deliver a speech about love, the hungover, hiccup-suffering Aristophanes, a famous satirist, explains the impact of Eros by suggesting that humans were originally creatures with two heads and eight limbs, two hemispheres fused together back-to-back, and that the angry gods split in half them as punishment for hubris. Each individual then spends the rest of his or her life looking for his or her severed other half, and only feels complete when they finally find them. Aristophanes’ story is partially an attempt to account for the existence of homosexuality, and he therefore awkwardly introduces the idea that there were originally three joined sexes—a man-man, a woman-woman, and a man-woman—in order to explain same-sex attraction. Of course, he also discloses that these creatures used to roll around the ground “like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air” when they wanted to cover a lot of ground, so maybe we shouldn’t take his account too seriously. (Socrates’ entry in the contest, by the way, propounds that the love of wisdom is more divine than simple erotic love—a footnote that Hedwig‘s script may not be entirely ignorant of).

You don’t have to take my word on the Platonic citation—Hedwig‘s score is explicit on that score. Hedwig herself sings the story to the lobster-bibbed patrons of Bilgewater’s restaurant (Chicago franchise—the Angry Inch has an exclusive contract to play at the budget seafood chain), illustrating the tale of Zeus’ thunderbolts splitting bulbous hermaphrodites in half with storybook slides projected onto a bedsheet hung in front of the salad bar.

You might call “The Origin of Love,” performed as a wistful power ballad, one of Hedwig‘s knockout numbers—except that they’re pretty much all knockout numbers. Stephen Trask’s score is full of earworms and flat-out tear-jerking, butt-shaking, fist-pumping tunes performed with punk panache in an eclectic array of styles. Hedwig might have remained a special interest curiosity, closeted in the gay community, if not for the power of its music to push a universal message about a dispossessed outsider desperate for love. Each high-energy number is tightly tied to the narrative, either coming out of Hedwig’s personal experience or (like “The Origin of Love”) illustrating a central theme. Although we dub the music “punk” because of its insurgent spirit, the score is eclectic; there’s something for everyone, and enough texture and change-ups to keep you interested no matter your musical proclivities. “Tear Me Down” is solid introductory rocker that showcases Hedwig the rebel and, by highlighting her Cold War Berliner origins, establishes her as a divided personality. An American G.I. seduces a pre-op Hedwig (then a “slip of a girly boy” named Hansel) with a trail of candy (including the boy’s favorite, “goomy bears”), a scene which segues into a performance of the country-tinged “Sugar Daddy.” The title song is the punkest number, explaining Hedwig’s dilemma with a literalism that puts the Bilgewater diners off their bread sticks: “My sex change operation got botched/My guardian angel fell asleep on the watch/Now all I got is a Barbie doll crotch/I got an angry inch…” (The performance erupts into a homophobic riot, but the band magically manages to keep playing their instruments even while their fists are flying). As good as all the songs are, it’s hard to point to one song as a show stopper, but if forced to choose many would pick “Wig in a Box.” It’s the production that celebrates Hedwig’s invention of herself as a drag rock goddess: it starts off as a piano ballad and mutates into a poppy doo-wop bubblegum number with a Bowie-esque melody. Hedwig’s trailer wall descends and turns into a stage, and a bouncing wig encourages us to sing along with the lyrics. The musical climaxes with an impressionistic, surrealistic 15-minute medley consisting of the melancholy “Hedwig’s Lament,” the punk-freakout “Exquisite Corpse,” an arena-rock reprise of the earlier “Wicked Little Town” with new lyrics, another intense glam-rocker in the triumphant “Midnight Radio,” and ending with a reprise of “Origin of Love” for the last shot fadeout. It’s one hell of a ride, and the highest compliment you can give the score is to point out that it works as a stand-alone release even without the framing narrative: it almost sounds like a lost concept album collaboration between David Bowie and the Stooges, with Bob Mould on guitar (Bob Mould really is on guitar).

If the rocking tunes are the most obvious factor that pulls Hedwig out of the pure gay-interest genre, we shouldn’t undersell the fact that Hedwig is a damn funny movie. The script is smart and isn’t afraid to lovingly mock its rock influences; the movie’s comic mix of philosophical and pop-culture obsessions is perfectly exemplified by the title of Hedwig’s rejected lecture on “the aggressive influence of German philosophy on rock and roll”: “You, Kant, Always Get What You Want.” Hedwig is full of quotable lines delivered by its laconic, passive-aggresive heroine in her studied Nordic drone: “Tommy, can you hear me? From this milkless teat you have sucked the very business we call show!” Hedwig provokes chuckles when she strings together pop music lyrics or geographical band names into free-associative monologues, or lists the influential Yank singers who touched a young East German girly boy listening to Radio America (including Anne Murray, “who was actually a Canadian working in the American idiom”) alongside the equally intriguing “crypto-homo” artists (including David Bowie, “who was actually an idiom working in America and Canada”). Her comic adventures have her honing her musical skills headlining a band of Korean army wives, before eventually growing big enough to play the folksy “Menses Fair.” With the Angry Inch, she develops a corny (not to say fruity) stand-up routine (complete with rim-shots) to warm up the plump audiences after they’ve loaded their buffet trays before she launches into another ear-blistering gay punk number. She’s smart, droll, and quick with a catty comeback, the kind of person you’d think twice about putting down for fear of a devastating verbal reprisal; her saving grace is that she usually turns her biting wit on herself.

Self-conscious, campy humor—the ability to deal with anticipated rejection through a preemptive quip—is an essential part of the drag queen archetype. Although Mitchell has created a living, breathing character with peculiarities and a nutty backstory all her own, he’s done so within the confines of a positive gay stereotype: the mildly grotesque, mildly bitchy femme who triumphs over society’s ostracism by being too damn interesting to ignore. Hedwig’s story is more than the typical tragically gay tale, though; it’s a positively monstrous one. The surgeon’s scalpel has left her sexless—worse than that, has left her with a inch long lump reminding her that she’s neither man nor woman, not even a hermaphrodite. She has no sexual identity. Her scarred and useless crotch serves as an exaggerated symbol of the stigma and shame many homosexuals feel. It’s no wonder that Hedwig’s response to her circumstance is to don a wig, a mask of makeup, and a larger than life persona that hides her core of loneliness from prying eyes. (The song “Wig in a Box” features Hedwig trying on various personae via hairpieces—the beehive, the Farrah Fawcett, the Dorothy Hammil—until she stumbles upon the rug representing the “punk rock star of stage and screen” and concludes “I’m never turning back”). Mitchell’s performance, honed through years of playing the same character, masterfully captures the full pathos and humor of Hedwig’s dual existence, the facade of gay glitter and the bitter soul underneath.

Hedwig’s story, which begins as a quest for her other half, by the end morphs via music video magic into a Jungian journey of self-realization. For most of the film, Hedwig pursues protégé Tommy Gnosis, her presumptive soul mate, across America on a tour that’s half revenge, half torch-carrying. But the film’s finale jettisons both the rock-and-roll rise-and-fall and the romantic comedy tropes in favor of expressionistic tableaux and psychodrama played out on a glam stage. The conclusion is vague to the point of being mystical, and deliberately invites interpretation (warning: don’t read on if you want to avoid spoilers). After an unlikely series of events Hedwig gets her comeuppance on the plagiarist Gnosis, and finds her talent recognized. What little reality the movie had to cling to is then discarded as Hedwig begins a major concert at “Bilgewater, Times Square.” At the end of the frenetic and fractured experimental punk number where she sings about being “all sewn up,” she rips off her wig and tears off her top to reveal that the two breastlike bumps under her bra were supplied by tomatoes (which she smashes against her flat-chested male torso). Suddenly, the crowd and the band are gone and Tommy Gnosis is singing a song of apology on an empty stage, as the unwigged Hedwig approaches him from afar. Gnosis sings to him/her, “there’s no mystical design/no cosmic lover preassigned…” Gnosis disappears, but the trademark silver cross on his forehead—the mark Hedwig originally gave him along with the stage name that means “knowledge”—now appears on the stripped singer, who materializes on a new stage reunited with the Angry Inch. Hedwig—or Hans?—then gives his wig to his backup singer and reluctant lover, Yitzhak, who puts it on and is transformed into a woman (the masulizing makeup job on Miriam Shor was impeccably done). Hedwig, now unmasked and (at least psychically) merged with Gnosis, ends the film stripped of her clothes and her glamor in a dark alley, marching forward naked into the glare of the streetlights and who knows what new reality.

Naked Hedwig in the alley is like the star child from 2001. She’s transformed through some process of evolution and transformation too profound to be stated in words. There’s almost too much symbolic meat to chew on here, but it seems that Hedwig has cast aside both her need for a mask to hide herself from the world, and her yen for another being to complete her. Aristophanes was wrong—or maybe the comic playwright was only half serious all along. Hedwig has become whole by discovering the wisdom that the him or her half she needed to complete him or herself lay buried deep inside him or herself all the time. That’s a heavy message for a rock and roll musical about a botched sex change operation to carry, but Hedwig finds itself strong and confident enough to bear the load.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Filmed with ferocious energy and with enough sexual variety to match late Fellini, it may be passing through standard bookings on its way to a long run as the midnight successor to ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show.’”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“One way of looking at this clever, funny, wildly innovative film tricked out with surreal pop embellishments and Day-Glo colors is to see it as the kind of movie David Bowie might have made had he pushed his early-70′s gender-bending persona to its logical limit.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“The film’s not only funny and weird, it’s oddly poignant.”–Desson Thomas, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: New Line Cinema: Hedwig and the Angry Inch – There’s not much here anymore on this one-page site, just the synopsis and six hi-res stills. Even the trailer appears to be missing.

IMDB LINK: Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Hedwig and the Angry Inch | Film | The New Cult Canon – Scott Tobias’ entry on Hedwig for The Onion A.V. Club’s “New Cult Canon” series

Hedwig in a Box [Archived] – An archived version of the large but inactive-since-2007 fan site, with a FAQ and an archived forum with a scary amount of discussion about the play and film. The archived home page even contains a link to an earlier archived version of the site.

DVD INFO: The New Line “Platinum Series” DVD (buy) is out-of-print but still widely available. Extras include a commentary track with writer/director/star John Cameron Mitchell and cinematographer Frank DeMarco, two deleted scenes, the trailer, cast and crew bios, and a long (85 minute) documentary showing the evolution of Hedwig from nightclub character to off-Broadway play to feature film. Thanks to its dedicated cult we would not expect this to stay out of print for very long; a re-release and Blu-ray edition is to be expected.

Hedwig is also available for rental viewing or download on Video-on-Demand (rent/buy).

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

FEATURING: Amos Poe, Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi, Lydia Lunch, Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, John Waters, Deborah Harry

PLOT: This documentary examines the “No Wave” and “Cinema of Transgression” film

movements and their connections to performance art and punk rock in New York City circa 1977-1985.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s purely a supplemental feature for your weird movie education, giving background information on a significant underground DIY film movement.

COMMENTS: “It felt like our lives were movies,” says Debbie Harry early on in Blank City. “It was very cinematic.” Perhaps this explains Celine Danhier’s choice, which earned her criticism in some quarters, to place the focus more on the filmmakers than the films in this documentary. Based on the No Wave film clips which illustrate the story, this was the correct angle to take on the material. Most of the “greatest hits” Super-8 highlights consist of grungy hipsters smoking cigarettes in grainy black and white, or walking around dirty East Village streets in washed-out, home-movie color. By contrast, the Bohemian lifestyle the filmmakers fondly recall—sharing $50 apartments in burnt out tenements with cockroaches, shooting on the street on the spur of the moment whenever they could assemble a crew, sneaking into locations to film without permission or permits, and heading off to CBGB’s after a hard day of scraping together footage to drink and dance the night away while a pre-fame Blondie or Television played on stage—is a lot more interesting. The No Wave scene flourished during New York City’s downbeat phase, when the burg was deep in debt, full of abandoned buildings, and riddled by crime and heroin abuse (basically, the New York of Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver). The city in the late Seventies was nasty and dangerous, but for nouveau-beatnik types it offered cheap rent, cheaper Super-8 film stock, and the company of like-minded free spirits. Although it grew out of the ashes of the previous New York avant-garde exemplified by Andy Warhol and Jack (Flaming Creatures) Smith, movement godfather Amos Poe explains that this wave rebelled against the abstract experimentalism of the previous period, seeking instead a cinema based in realism, narrative, and political consciousness. The works emerging from this enterprise were (for the most part) grounded in the gritty reality of the streets. Filmmakers, graffiti artists and punk bands deliberately cross-fertilized ideas (John Lurie explains that “the painters were in bands, the musicians were making movies or painting, nobody did what they knew how to do.”) The resulting movies were amateur, improvisational, and based around dramatic scenarios that required no money (the most ambitious may have been James Nares’ Rome ’78, which located its story in ancient Rome using classical Gotham facades of museums, libraries and post offices as sets). When Reaganism rolled around and the economy rebounded, there was suddenly money available for funding filmmakers and artists, and success and sell-outs gutted the movement. Jean-Michel Basquiat, who used to use abandoned buildings as his canvases, became a darling of the art world. Susan Seidelman’s punk drama Smithereens (1982) made it all the way to Cannes, and within three years she was making a studio vehicle for Madonna. In 1984 Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise was another festival hit, and the No Wave was suddenly looking relatively mainstream. In reaction to the sudden respectability of the New York underground, in 1985 Nick Zedd, Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch launched a  more dangerous and nihilistic movement they dubbed “Cinema of Transgression.” Equally as amateur as their No Wave forebears, this counter-movement is more interesting (for our purposes, at least) due to their confrontational themes and weird textures. In The Wild World of Lydia Lunch (1983), Nick Zedd documented his breakup with Lunch, basically stalking the annoyed-looking goth beauty with his camera. The same director’s notorious and much-despised Geek Maggot Bingo (1983) features bizarre, Kuchar-esque tableaux: cardboard sets, cheap cyclops masks, and a cameo by horror host Zacherly. Kern’s Manhattan Love Suicides (1985) was a suite of blackly comic short films about obsessive love, each ending with a gruesome suicide. The Cinema of Transgression may not have produced any unquestionable masterpieces (or achieved much that John Waters hadn’t done before, and done better), but it did have the all-important sex, graphic violence, and obscenity charges necessary to garner an enduring infamy not shared by the tamer No Wave movies. All in all, Blank City is an interesting, nostalgic time capsule whose main function may be to inspire you to grab a couple of friends and a cheap camera and make your own movies that no one will ever see. Most of the films profiled here may not be worth the trouble of seeking out, but it sure looks like the artists had a blast making them.

Liquid Sky (1982), a very weird (it’s about aliens hooked on chemicals secreted by the human brain during orgasm) New York based film of the period, gets overlooked because it was made by No Wave outsiders, and because it parodied the New York punk art scene rather than celebrating it. Llik Your Idols (2007) was a lower-profile documentary with a many of the same talking heads, but focused almost entirely on the Cinema of Transgression.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The effect is something akin to having chaotically experimental work screened in the sterile white chambers of a modern-art museum, rather than, say, a bedsheet in the back of a squat basement or on a fifth-generation VHS dub. It makes for a certain head-snapping dissonance, but also a granting of respect to artists who have rarely received it.”–Chris Barsanti, Film Journal International (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Steven Soderbergh, Betsy Brantley, David Jensen, Mike Malone

PLOT: A series of absurdist sketches and nonsense dialogues linked together by a thin plot

about an office worker struggling with an assignment to write a major speech for a cultlike motivational speaker obviously based on L. Ron Hubbard.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Hilarious witticism characterizing film’s oddness. Cautious disclaimer suggesting uneven satire undermines enjoyability, but granting nobility of purpose and peculiar appeal. Self-aggrandizing non sequitur.

COMMENTS: After Schizopolis bombed at Cannes, writer/director/star Steven Soderbergh appended a prologue where he stood on a stage and introduced the film. “In the event that you find certain sequences or ideas confusing, please bear in mind that this is your fault, not ours,” he advised. “You will need to see the picture again and again until you understand everything.” We are then thrown into the story of Fletcher Munson, a chronic office masturbator suffering from writer’s block as he attempts to pen a speech for “Eventualism” founder T. Azimuth Switters. A third of the way through the movie he meets (and sort of becomes) his exact double, an amorous dentist named Korchek who happens to be having an affair with Munson’s wife, but Korchek (or is it Munson inhabiting Korchek’s body?) falls in love with Munson’s wife’s doppelgänger, Attractive Woman #2. Then, in the movies final act we see the same scenes replayed from the perspective of Mrs. Munson. Interspersed with all of this are bits involving a pantsless old man running away from a pair of orderlies, news reports suggesting Rhode Island has been sold to a consortium of investors who want to turn it into a shopping mall, and a shot of a sign posted on a tree reading “idea missing.” Oh, and there’s also an exterminator who speaks gibberish and seduces local housewives. What’s there to possibly be confused about? Sorerbergh, who started his career with Sex, Lies and Videotape, the movie that launched the indie filmmaking revolution, made Schziopolis as a palette-cleanser after his big budget flop Underneath left a bad taste in his mouth (a fan cleverly described this as Soderbergh’s “second first film“). Working with his friends on a budget of only $250,000, it’s a loose, breezy, seemingly improvised movie. You can sense the crew cutting loose and having fun making it; in fact, you sense they’re having more fun making it than you’re having watching it, but their enthusiasm is infectious. The main running joke revolves around communication breakdowns between men and women: a husband and wife’s rote pleasantries are rendered with abstract literalism (“generic greeting,” “generic greeting returned!”) and another couple exchange nonsensical double entendres (“nose army… beef diaper?”), while later in the film male characters’ lines are dubbed into untranslated Japanese, Italian and French. The movie never develops an overarching theme, however, and always comes across as a series of sketches. The experience is something like watching a feature film made by a television comedy troupe recycling favorite bits and characters when you never saw the original shows. Sorderbergh, who plays the two main roles, turns out to be a surprisingly competent comic actor, and there are enough ideas thrown out to keep adventurous audiences watching. It’s basically a postmodern goof, light entertainment for smart, weird people; a curious frolic by a director who quickly returned to more conventional material.

Schizopolis, which had trouble landing a distributor and sank like a stone on release, was a surprise pickup for the Criterion Collection. The Criterion edition isn’t as packed with extra material as some of their other releases, but it does contain two separate commentary tracks. The first is a conversation between four cast and crew members which is informative but standard, but the other commentary is a very cool treat. On it, Sorderbergh interviews himself, pretending to be a pretentious auteur with a God complex while simultaneously taking the role of an increasingly exasperated interviewer. In the course of the conversation the fake Sorderbergh divulges his second career writing novels under the pseudonym “Stephen King,” explains how he thinks it will be more interesting for people to hear him talking about his artistic process rather than focusing solely on his influence on other filmmakers, and reveals how he strives to create a comfortable atmosphere on set where people will not be too intimidated to compliment him. He also takes calls on his cell phone while recording the commentary. At one point, he says, “I’m all for free speech and all that s**t, but I don’t think there should be critics. I just don’t think it’s right for people to be able to publish their responses to art, especially great art.” Sorderbergh’s self-parody here is  brave and brilliant, and I can honestly say this is the first comedy I’ve seen where I laughed harder at the DVD commentary than at the movie itself.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a real head-scratcher that so insistently keeps jumping all over the place that it becomes impossible to pinpoint its intent.”–Todd McCarthy, Variety (contemporaneous)

(This movie was first nominated for review by John, who described it as “strangely… funny.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Steve Ballot

FEATURING: Frank Meyer

PLOT: Frank, a mentally challenged old man with a speech impediment, kills various people he

meets as he searches for true love from a woman with large breasts.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: As an authentic piece of goombah outsider art, The Bride of Frank is actually weird, but it’s also bad. And I mean real bad, not “entertaining” bad.

COMMENTS: The movie begins with a toothless old man tricking a five year-old girl into getting into his big rig, trying to get her to kiss him, then crushing her head under the wheel of his truck after she calls him a “dirty bum.” If that scenario sounds like can’t miss comedy gold to you, then you’re The Bride of Frank‘s target audience. All others will want to observe that “beware” rating. That opening scene of child molestation played for laughs does have the virtue of driving away most of the audience before the film can even get started; anyone who continues on past that point can’t pretend to be surprised by the senseless killing, simulated defecation, and sexual perversion that follows. Tonally, the opening, which makes us want to destroy Frank with fire, is a huge problem because it’s out of character with the way the rest of the movie wants to portray him—as a hideous-looking but childlike outcast, a la Frankenstein’s monster, who only kills bad people after they insult and reject him. To wit: Frank decapitates a nerd and relieves himself inside the corpse after being insulted at his birthday party, rips the face off a transvestite who tricks him into a sexual encounter, tears the eye out of a 300 pound exotic dancer and violates her corpse because she’s a tease, and so on. Yawn. Are we jaded yet? More conventional comic relief comes from the poetically obscene homoerotic/homophobic repartee between two of Frank’s coworkers, which is slightly amusing, but nothing you haven’t heard before if you’ve ever worked with Jersey teamsters on a loading dock. Frank, the weatherbeaten, dim, ex-homeless killer whose speech impediment is so thick he’s often subtitled, is played by real-life ex-homeless man Frank Meyer. Frank is like John Waters regular Edith Massey, except he’s not in on the joke. He’s not acting, he’s simply repeating lines as best he can as they’re fed to him one at a time by the director. Except for the serial killing part, this is Frank’s real character, including shots of his real living quarters and his real pet stray cats. So if you’re laughing at the way he mumbles out his scatological threats, you’re not laughing at a performance, but at a real person. (In real life, Frank Morgan is actually a skid row hero, a survivor who’s played the bad hand life dealt him as well as he possibly could). If you can stomach Pink Flamingos levels of bad taste, at least Frank‘s not boring; even though it has no narrative plan and looks entirely improvised, there’s always something going on. There’s even a talented person in the movie: one of the blind dates who answers Frank’s personals ad is an opera diva who sings “you’re not a man of society, you’re not a man of wealth/I think that you should be condemned by the Board of Health”—while juggling! She’s so classy, Frank doesn’t even gouge out her eyes. Another high point is a nightmare sequence that features Frank and his mothers’ heads bounding around on their solarized bodies; it has a crude MS-Paint-meets-el-cheapo-VHS-editing-suite charm. Still, the film’s minor amusements don’t make up for its moral and aesthetic bankruptcy—these guys just aren’t smart and witty enough to pull off transgressive. They genuinely think fake feces made out of peanuts and brownie batter constitutes side-splitting prop comedy; the movie’s not even nihilism, unless you’d call it naïve nihilism. If Beavis and Butthead grew up and filmed a tribute to John Waters, The Bride of Frank would be the result.

If The Bride of Frank looks like it was made by a bunch of amateurs fooling around making a gory horror movie on the loading dock after work, well, that’s pretty much what happened. You have to give this to Steve Ballot: against all odds he realized his dream and actually made a movie. The Bride of Frank played a few underground film festivals, but Ballot refused a distribution deal from Troma, comparing their proposed contract to an offer of sodomy. He printed a few copies on VHS and word got out in the underground, where the movie was bootlegged and passed around enough among trash aficionados to convince Sub Rosa to take a chance on releasing it on DVD. This disc is packed with a freakish amount of extras for those who can’t get enough Frank, including audio commentary, outtakes, a thirty minute (!) alternate ending, and even a featurette on “Buttersound,” the faux-surround sound used on the soundtrack. It’s the Criterion edition release of amateur sleaze movies.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If Fellini had grown up in New Jersey and only had fifteen bucks to make a movie, The Bride of Frank might very well be the one he made… oh, and if he had been really insane too!”–Alternative Cinema Magazine

(This movie was nominated for review by Jason, who correctly predicted it “should be in the beware section I think.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Christiane Cegavske

FEATURING: With one minor exception, all characters are silent animated puppets

PLOT:  A group of aristocratic white mice commission rodentlike creatures with beaks (called the “Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak”) to create a doll for them, but once the puppet is fashioned the Creatures refuse to give it up; instead, they revere it and sew an egg they find floating in a creek inside its torso.  The mice steal the doll and take it to their lair, so the Creatures set out on a journey to recover it.  Along the way they meet a frog sorcerer and a spider with a human face, and everything changes when the egg inside the doll hatches.

BACKGROUND:

• The film took 13 years to make, with Cegavske animating perhaps 10 seconds a day.  Many of the models and effects used show up in the director’s 1992 short Blood and Sunflowers.
• Cegavske intends for Blood Tea and Red String to be part of a trilogy, and in 2011 she announced the second part of the project, titled Seed in the Sand.  She estimates this installment will take five years to complete.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Blood Tea is bizarre throughout, and many will be attracted to the psychedelic splashiness of the sequence where the Oak Dwellers eat hallucinogenic berries and see morphing pink and green leaf patterns overlaid on the courtyard garden.  For my money, though, things are at the weirdest when we climb inside the dark mouse hole and watch the well-dressed vermin pour bloody tea onto the lips of the lifeless doll while their skull-headed pet raven looks on.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A dialogue-free stop-motion animated fable done in the style of Jan

Original trailer for Blood Tea and Red String

Svankmajer, but with a darkly feminine spin, Blood Tea and Red String gently folds surrealism into its fairy tale structure to create a weirdly compelling world.  It’s an inverted Alice, told from the perspective of mutant rodents, depraved white mice, and mystical frogs.

COMMENTS:  Artist Christiane Cegavske had been living with the haunting creatures of Blood Tea and Red String in her head for years before bringing them to life.  Her first visions of white mice were far more terrifying than the subtly unsettling red-eyed rodents who eventually made it to the screen.  In their first appearance in a Cegavske painting, the vermin torture a nude, bound woman in a rose garden: two of the creatures threaten her breasts with massive scissors, while a third kneels between her spread legs, sewing her up with red string.

Cegavske’s view of the creatures had softened by the time she conceived the story for Blood Tea, and their menace subsided into a background aura.  In her DVD commentary the artist consistently speaks of these creatures, along with other denizens of her subconscious world like the Oak Dwellers (sort of a mutant hybrid of shrews and crows), as if they were real beings with an independent existence; she has learned some things about them, she tells us, but does not pretend to have all the answers.  She confesses that she does not know the name of the Spider, or where the mice get the hemoglobin to brew their favorite beverage, or where the Frog finds the hearts he uses in his magic rituals.  Her understanding of the creatures evolved over time, and with greater familiarity it seems she no longer sees them as terrifying, as did the young girl who painted the first image of torturer mice.  By the time of Blood Tea the characters had become ambiguous, mysterious fairy tale creatures with inscrutable habits and customs, unfit to be judged by human standards.

I’m not implying Cegavske is a crazy woman who literally sees visions of twisted creatures and catalogs their behavior like some schizophrenic crypto-anthropologist.  It’s just that she honors these characters’ subconscious origins; she conceives of each entity in a dream and slowly cultivates a relationship with it, letting it divulge to her what it will over a period of many years.  Her approach to characterization is patiently Surrealist.  When she finally unleashed the results of her studies of these beings and their curious customs on the world, they simultaneously appear fully fleshed-out, breathing creatures, yet they remain full of secrets.

The affluent mice have somehow discovered a vintage Victorian portrait of a human woman with blood-red cheeks and lips, and they want the Oak Dwellers (obviously this world’s premier artisans) to create a simulacrum for them. The Oak Dwellers do so, but fall in love with their own creation, sew up an egg they find floating in a stream inside it, and mount it on their tree like a crucified savior (or a scarecrow).  The mice, arriving in the night in their turtle-drawn carriage, steal the doll and take it back to a mouse hole full of ticking clocks, where they get drunk on blood and play a game where they deal out hands of blank cards.  Meanwhile, the Oak Dwellers put on cloaks and set out on a journey to recover their creation.  They encounter carnivorous plants, but are saved by an amphibian wizard who feeds the hungry pods hearts in place of their prey.  And so it goes.  The story has the outline of a fairy tale or an epic fantasy quest that makes it easy enough to follow, but the details are gnarled, amazing and strange.  It’s a near-perfect blend of surrealism and story, with no language to nail it down to a single meaning (the Dweller’s squawks and the mice’s squeaks convey only the most basic of emotions, like anger or alarm).

The world Cegavske fashions recalls the earliest folk versions of fairy tales—before they were refashioned by Victorian moralists to teach children useful behavioral lessons—stories set in lands populated by inscrutable magical creatures with obscure motivations.  The meanings of these tales, which accrued and mutated over generations, are often unclear and often amoral; the point of the stories, invented to amuse, is to evoke wonder.  But meanings do suggest themselves, seeping through the fabric of the tale.  Though Blood Tea and Red String is decidedly and deliberately undidactic, motifs of female reproduction poke through the story.  The title itself subtly evokes a feminine hygiene product, and an obvious image of menstruation occurs with a shot of blood leaking between the doll’s feet.  Eggs are an important symbol, and are even kept inside the doll (the only clearly female character in this otherwise sexless world).  There is a pregnancy and a birth (rendered grotesquely, Alien style).  Creatures are continually being wrapped up into womblike containers—the carnivorous plant pods which envelop the sleeping Oak Dwellers, the spider that tighly wraps its captured prey in a red string cocoon, a corpse sewn snugly into a leaf coffin.  There are fewer symbols of the male reproductive system, but they do appear, in the form of acorns.  This seed first appears nonchalantly affixed to the lead Dweller’s staff.  Later the crew gets drunk on Frog’s brew (sipped from nut cups) and see a vision of an acorn which splits open and turns into an egg.  Why this reproductive imagery is in the movie is unclear (perhaps it has to do with the project’s long gestation), but it does help unify the unconscious rhythms of the film, while distantly linking the story to ancient fertility myths.

Visually, Blood Tea owes much of its look to Czech Surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer, an influence whom Cegavske is eager to credit.  The white mice fashion their sartorial style on Alice‘s white rabbit, down to their white ruffled collars and scarlet frock coats.  Most of Cegavske’s models have that weathered, antique quality—like leftover wooden toys from a pre-plastic era—typical of the objects Svankmajer loves to animate.  Yet, while she takes cues from the Czech master, Cegavske does create a style of her own, by setting her action not in the real world but inside of carefully composed, pastoral dioramas that resemble children’s pop-up storybooks.  Svankmajer confines his creatures in claustrophobic interiors, but for the most part Cegavske lets hers roam in open fields and gardens—gardens where the sunflowers have faces.

Blood Tea‘s animation is necessarily herky-jerky, but the style works in favor of the mythical material by removing the action one step from reality while still remaining rooted in the physical world.  Like the movie’s story and visuals, Mark Growden’s score is off-key yet oddly melodic, mixing calliopes with recorders or lutes with a Jew’s harp to create tunes which sound medieval and otherworldly at the same time.

For a project that took an amazing thirteen years to complete, it’s remarkable that Blood Tea and Red String isn’t overly thought out—and I mean that as a compliment.  Half-rodent, half-crow creatures who live in oak trees and build dolls for blood-addicted mice don’t need extensive backstories.  It’s enough to know they tend sunflowers, sew eggs into puppets, and implicitly trust mystical frogs who carry endless supplies of hearts beneath their robes.  What seems like randomness to us to them is ritual.  We should feel honored and privileged to glimpse these noble and elegant creatures as they trek about their Faerie world on wispy business we’re too thick and pragmatic to fully comprehend.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… a David Lynchean fever dream on Beatrix Potter terrain… Often grotesque, though never in the ‘Sick and Twisted’ juvenile gross-out mode, dreamlike feature is as lovingly crafted as it is unsettlingly sour-sweet, with Mark Growden’s avant-garde folk score in perfect synch.”–Dennis Harvey, Variety (festival screening)

“…the tale becomes both increasingly macabre and bizarrely poignant… if the tale’s moral is less than clear, its haunting images speak directly to some dark, preverbal corner of the heart.”–Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide

“In a word, crazy, but while Cegavske’s craft… is nothing if not painstaking, her story unravels dispassionately, and with zero sexual innuendo—an arbitrary string of strange happenings that starve for subtext.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Blood Tea and Red String - There’s only a little bit of information on this page—plot synopsis, quotes from favorable reviews, and links to buy Blood Tea merchandise—but you may enjoy poking around the rest of christianecegavske.com

IMDB LINK: Blood Tea and Red String (2006)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Blood Tea & Red String Panel – Brief clip of Cegavske discussing the film and her influences at the Anime L.A. convention in 2007

Seed in the Sand by Christiane Cegavske – Kickstarter – Information on the second part of the intended trilogy that started with Blood Tea and Red String, including a plot synopsis and a peek at a set.  The project is already funded.

DVD INFO: The Cinema Epoch DVD (buy) contains a wealth of revealing background material, as befits a labor of love like Blood Tea and Red String.  Cegavske shares some of her “miniature paintings” (many of which appear in the film) and shows and discusses the sketches in which the characters from Blood Tea first revealed themselves to her in a segment called “character and story development.”  The brief, narrated survey of “production stills” gives us insight into the sets and provides us with a sense of scale.  Most important and interesting is the commentary, which takes the form of a conversation between the creator and actor/film critic Luke Y. Thompson.  In the commentary Cegavske seems shy, very much the distracted artist; she’s pained to give answers to certain questions, but she warms up enthusiastically when talking about her creations.  She has a refreshingly different personality than most directors: she comes off as a cool, weird chick with an eternal girlishness about her.

(This movie was nominated for review by NGboo, who called it “one of the most creative and imaginative fantasies. Surreal, enigmatic, bittersweet, cutely-morbid & bizarre stop-motion animation.” 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.)

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.