Tag Archives: Must see

51*. HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (2022)

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 “We had the spirit of Jean Nicolet and Werner Herzog with us as we were attempting to make the greatest Wisconsin film of all time. Hopefully.” ― Mike Cheslik

 DIRECTED BY: Mike Cheslik                                                                                      

FEATURING: Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Olivia Graves, Doug Mancheski, Luis Rico, Wes Tank

PLOT: Following the destruction of his home and factory, applejack purveyor Jean Kayak attempts, and fails, to outwit a variety of woodland creatures in his quest to find food and shelter. Thanks to the tutelage of a master trapper, he learns the fur trade, and his exploits catch the eye of a pretty furrier; however, her merchant father demands that he bring in hundreds of dead beavers to obtain her hand in marriage. Jean sets out to fulfill this request – under the watchful eye of a pair of bucktoothed detectives – whereupon he stumbles upon a massive supervillainous plot.

Still from Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

BACKGROUND:

  • High school best friends Cheslik and Tews worked together previously on Apocrypha candidate Lake Michigan Monster. The idea for Hundreds of Beavers was concocted at a bar during the 2018 Milwaukee Film Festival, where Lake Michigan Monster was screening.
  • The film was shot near small towns in Wisconsin and Michigan over the course of 12 weeks, spread across two winters in 2019 and 2020.
  • Some of the cast have found fame outside of film acting. Graves (the Furrier) has earned renown under the name The Witch of Wonderlust as a folk magician, travel blogger, and pole dancing instructor (the latter talent of which she demonstrates to great effect in a surprising moment in the film), while Tank (the Master Trapper) gained viral fame for his mid-pandemic video series featuring rap performances of Dr. Seuss books.
  • Cheslik and producer Kurt Ravenwood put the total budget at $150,000, with a full $10,000 allotted to the purchase of the mascot costumes. All told, the filmmakers purchased 6 beavers, 5 dogs, 2 rabbits, one raccoon, one wolf and one skunk. (The horse costume, such as it is, is bespoke.) The vast number of woodland creatures on screen at any given time were courtesy of the film’s 1,500 visual effects, all composed in Adobe After Effects.
  • Recognizing that selling the film to a traditional distributor would likely result in a cursory release before being dumped on video, the producers retained the exhibition rights and commenced a roadshow tour of festivals across North America, complete with live wrestling battles between Tews and a beaver mascot. They report that more than half of the $500,000 in box office receipts came after the film became available through video-on-demand.
  • The film’s poster is modeled after the one-sheet for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
  • Named to multiple “Best of 2024” lists, including the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. The movie took the prize for Best Narrative Film at the Kansas International Film Festival, while Cheslik was named Best Director at the 2023 Phoenix Film Festival. The film also claimed both of those awards at that year’s Wyoming Film Festival.
  • The consensus pick by the writers of this site as the Best Weird Movie of 2024.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: From start to finish, Hundreds of Beavers is almost nothing but indelible images. After the zany animated prologue, there’s the silly running gag of surprise holes in the ice that turn out to be integral to the plot; every single appearance of an animal costume, including gay rabbits, overfed raccoons, and dogs playing poker; mascot guts; ice pond pinball; and so many groups of beavers that take the form of construction crews, a police force, and even a jury. There are no wrong answers. But nothing sums it all up quite like the sight of Jean Kayak on the run from the eponymous horde, his absurd raccoon hat flying off his head while innumerable human-sized Castor canadensis give chase. It’s an intentional borrow from Buster Keaton, solidifying the connection with the glory days of silent comedy and making good on the promise of the provocative title.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: The unhittable spittoon; Elementary, my dear Beaver

 WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: For a film that looks and feels like it should be a two-reeler from a hundred years ago, Hundreds of Beavers pulls off the astounding trick of using current-day, commercially available technology to assemble vintage styles and hoary-chestnut jokes into something new and entirely unexpected. Between Cheslik’s endlessly inventive microbudget solutions that result in an action film to rival a Fast and Furious entry (at .03% of the bankroll) and Tews’ gloriously full-bodied, rubber-faced performance, the elements are in place to build a tale of ever-escalating silliness and absurdity. Most of the time, you can’t really predict what’s going to happen next, and even in those moments where you might anticipate what is to come, it is accomplished with grin-inducing surprise and wit.

Trailer for Hundreds of Beavers (2022)

COMMENTS: Jean Kayak’s applejack distillery is called “Acme.” That Continue reading 51*. HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS (2022)

50*. TOBY DAMMIT (1968)

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“I am always displeased by circumstances for which I cannot
account. Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his
health.”–Edgar Allan Poe, “Never Bet the Devil Your Head”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING:

PLOT: Toby Dammit, a once famous actor whose career is in jeopardy because of alcoholism, accepts a role in a “Catholic Western” to be shot in Italy, on condition that he be given a Ferrari. Drinking throughout the evening of his arrival in Rome and increasingly incoherent, Dammit bumbles his way through a television interview and an appearance as guest speaker at an awards ceremony. Finally, he jumps into the sports car and races through the deserted streets of Rome, but becomes lost in an increasingly unreal city.

Still from Toby Dammit (1968)

BACKGROUND:

  • “Toby Dammit” was originally filmed as an entry in Spirits of the Dead, an anthology based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories.  ‘s version of “William Wilson” and ‘s “Metzengerstein” were the other entries. “Dammit” is inspired by Poe’s “Never Bet the Devil Your Head,”  an unusually comic outing for the macabre author, but takes almost nothing from the short story’s plot.
  • Terence Stamp traveled to Italy to make this film with Fellini, and stayed for several years afterwards. His very next film project was the lead role as the mysterious seductive stranger in Pasolini‘s Teorema.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In Poe’s story, the Devil was an old man, but Fellini chose to recast Old Scratch as a young girl (the actress was actually 22, but appears much younger). Fellini said he felt that Toby’s personal devil should represent his own immaturity. Fellini again demonstrates his genius with faces, as the pallid, mysteriously grinning girl is as devilish and chilling as waifs come.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Bouncy-ball escalator game; waxwork chef run down by sports car

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Fellini and Poe are an unexpected combination, but the Italian director takes to the American writer’s gloominess like a libertine takes to laudanum.  Fellini’s carnivalesque portraiture easily bends towards the ghastly. The director never tried his hand at another outright horror movie, but “Dammit” makes you wonder what might have been.

Trailer for Spirits of the Dead (1968) with “Toby Dammit” clips

COMMENTS: “Toby Dammit” is an interstitial work which Fellini Continue reading 50*. TOBY DAMMIT (1968)

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE SUBSTANCE (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Coralie Fargeat

FEATURING: , Dennis Quaid,

PLOT: An aging actress loses her job as hostess of an aerobics show on her 50th birthday and is recruited into trying a bizarre underground “anti-aging” substance, with instructions and regimens that must be followed precisely to avoid unwanted side effects.

Still from the substance (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: In the third act, an unhinged black comedy emerges from the carcass of what to this point had merely been an odd, satirical horror movie.

COMMENTS: Incredibly, just about everything in Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore film—which mixes sledgehammer satire and comedy with clean ian interiors, squicky Cronenbergian body horror, and a third act tonal shift often described as “bonkers”—works. It’s a message movie that doesn’t spare the blood and guts or the leering nudity (the movie is of the view that you can’t satirize the male gaze without indulging it). The cinematography is ace, the soundtrack on point, the practical effects astonish, it never drags despite a almost 2.5 hour runtime, Qualley appears to be the most beautiful woman in the world, Quaid hams it up delightfully as an empty-suit corporate cad, and has never given a better performance. It’s both elevated horror and degraded horror, equally indebted to the art-house and the grindhouse, and it never goes halfway when it could instead go to twice the length you expect.

The high concept plot gives Fargeat space to make lots of obvious—but funny—jokes about men reduced drooling idiots when confronted with a beautiful woman, and why women might lust after that kind of power. We are a superficial species, after all. That’s why we fall for blatantly Faustian bargains, as when Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle is offered the opportunity to create a “better version of herself” by picking up a packet of suspect medical gear from a back-alley beauty supply company. Set amidst L.A.’s glitz, the script addresses our obsession with surface beauty, but as it intensifies it peers deeper into human psychology. Sure, youth and beauty is associated with fame and success, but it’s also the inverse of decay and death: even slowly fading beauty like Elisabeth’s is a reminder of mortality. The scenario also invites concepts of split personality and addiction (there are a lot of needles here, and literally self-destructive behavior). Besides the satirical jibes at such follies, The Substance offers a good deal of heart and empathy. Moore reveals her (gracefully) aging body to public scrutiny in an uncomfortable nude scene, and is compensated with a wonderful scene in front of the mirror as she desperately attempts to achieve an impossible ideal of female beauty, despite the fact that it’s obvious to everyone but herself that she’s more than glamorous enough for the occasion.

The Substance‘s first two acts take place in an exaggerated reality that allows it to focus solely on satire and psychology. Just about everyone other than Moore and Qualley act like caricatures (Quaid is the lynchpin here). Why is the substance apparently offered to Elisabeth for free? Why are network TV aerobics programs so lucrative and influential? How does Sue manage to build that secret room, and why is there no super in her million-dollar apartment? What are the chances either Elisabeth or Sue are always the featured image on the billboard right outside her own window? And just how in the hell is this Substance supposed to work, in a biological/continuity of consciousness sense? You take everything on faith: details that are irrelevant to the main characters’ psychological realities are simply ignored. But your ability to suspend disbelief is shattered in the third act, which is a pure B-movie nightmare hallucination. The practical effects, which previously recalled Cronenberg, now look like a blend of Screaming Mad George’s work on Society,  Toxie from The Toxic Avenger, and something out of a freak movie—in fact, the entire finale resembles something that might result if Henenlotter were given a multi-million dollar budget for stage blood and access to an crack cinematographer. Even with those hints, the results are nothing you could possibly anticipate.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…while the film’s escalating weirdness eventually spirals out of control in the final sequence—it’s not quite camp; it’s more like John Waters- or Lloyd Kaufman-style trash—I was certainly never bored during the 140-minute runtime.”–Sonny Bunch, The Bulwark (contemporaneous)

The Substance [4K UHD]
  • The Substance [4K UHD]

44*. POOR THINGS (2023)

“Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.”― Alasdair Gray, Poor Things

DIRECTED BY: Yorgos Lanthimos

FEATURING: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef

PLOT: When a pregnant woman throws herself off a bridge, scientist Godwin Baxter spots an opportunity to conduct an unprecedented science experiment by transplanting the fetal brain into her mother’s body. The result is Bella, a woman with a grown-up physique and an infantile mind, who develops at a rapid rate and soon discovers many adult pleasures not otherwise accessible to an impressionable youth. Speaking with a frankness about herself and others that flies in the face of standards for propriety, she leaves home to explore the world, first in the company of caddish attorney Duncan Wedderburn and later as an employee in a Parisian bordello, returning  home  to discover that a figure from her past has located her.

Still from poor things (2023)

BACKGROUND:

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Bella’s very raison d’etre is to explore the world on her terms, following her bliss and flagrantly disregarding social niceties. Nothing better expresses this impulse than her spin on the dance floor, staggering about in full thrall to the music, limbs flung in every direction, and doing so with such verve and joy that even Mark Ruffalo’s Duncan is compelled to join in.

TWO WEIRD THINGS: Bubble burps; “I have to go punch that baby”

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A spectacular blend of quirky plot, offbeat setting, and demented execution, Poor Things is joyously inappropriate. In a film where virtually nobody behaves according to convention, the heroine is someone who casts aside any semblance of decorum in favor of a life lived as she chooses. The result is an unexpected blend of Frankenstein, Big, Candide, and The Opening of Misty Beethoven.

Official trailer for Poor Things

COMMENTS: The most dreaded phase for parents rearing a child is Continue reading 44*. POOR THINGS (2023)

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: POOR THINGS (2023)

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Poor Things has been promoted onto the Apocryphally Weird movie list. Please read the official entry.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , Ramy Youssef

PLOT: Bella, a mad scientist’s creation with the mind of a child (literally), runs off with a rakish attorney to explore the world.

Still from Poor Things (2023)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA:  A bizarre reanimation of Frankenstein played as a sexually-charged, surreal social satire, Poor Things is packed with mad science and madder art. There’s even a crazy dance scene that trumps the one from Dogtooth.

COMMENTS: In Poor Things, Emma Stone embodies Bella, an experiment of the Frankensteinish Dr. Godwin (whom she calls “God”). She begins the tale with the mind of a child, for extraordinary reasons that may already have been spoiled for you by the online conversation (I won’t spoil things further, in case you’ve somehow managed to avoid them). Since this is a darkly whimsical fantasy/science fiction hybrid, her mind races towards adulthood at an allegorical pace: she goes from throwing tantrums and delighting in the sponginess of a squished frog to sipping gin and studying for anatomy exams in mere months. She begins the film clunking humorously around Godwin’s estate, cared for by the beyond-eccentric doctor and his meek assistant Max, who becomes smitten with the “very pretty retard”; but as she gains self-awareness (including, crucially, awareness of her clitoris), she demands to see the outside world. In the company of hedonistic playboy (a brilliantly foppish and comic Ruffalo), she adventures through a steampunk 19th-century Lisbon, takes a trip on a cruise ship, and interns at Parisian brothel before returning to London a wiser woman, ready to face what she is and to wrap up the first act’s carefully planted plot points.

It’s easy to see why the three supporting males are all mesmerized by Bella in their own ways: she is an utterly unique creation, unburdened by society’s expectations of proper behavior— especially in regards to sex, which she refers to as “furious jumping.” She journeys from childlike innocence to an outsider’s adulthood in the course of two-an-a-half hours. Joining her on her quest of self-discovery are the aforementioned Ruffalo (who will likely earn a best supporting actor nod), Max (Youssef, likable if largely inefficacious, he’s the character using a conventional moral lens to examine the questionable ethics of the entire scenario), and the astoundingly conceived Godwin (Dafoe). The good (?) doctor sports a face crisscrossed with a lattice of scars that makes him look like a mad surgeon gave up trying to make his head into a jigsaw puzzle halfway through, has a gastric disorder that makes him belch large bubbles after eating, and reveals a fancifully cruel backstory that explains his bizarrely empirical outlook on life. Stone, Ruffalo and Dafoe are all great; Youssef is more than adequate; and while a few of the supporting performers have difficulty striking the odd comic tone Lanthimos is going for, the acting in general is astonishingly good. Based on Alasdair Grey’s novel, the script mixes overly-elaborate locutions (“Hence, I seek employment at your musty-smelling establishment of good-time fornication”) with punchy one-liners (like, “I must go punch that baby,”) mostly delivered by Stone—although the increasingly frustrated Ruffalo gets off some fine obscenity-laced tirades.

The production design keeps pace with the acting quality, capturing the insanity of the scenario. Godwin’s mansion is a Victorian cabinet of curiosities (including such curiosities as a chicken-dog); Lisbon has a touch of steampunk with cable cars in the sky; the snowy streets of Paris house brothels with facades like cathedrals. Sets are elaborate, with yellow and blue trompe l’oeil clouds blanketing the sky. The short intertitles separating the chapters are minature works of art. Lanthimos continues to indulge the cinematographic experiments he began in 2018’s The Favourite. Some are purposeful: the film is in black and white while Bella is protected in Godwin’s care, and turns to vivid color once she seizes her independence. Others seem arbitrary: we sometimes view the action through a peephole matte (which sometimes signals imprisonment, but not always), or through an ultra-wide fisheye lens (used for panoramas—I think this look has become part of Lanthimos’ standard toolkit at this point). The visual switches suggest Bella’s disorientation in a world that’s entirely new to her, but I confess I found them sometimes distracting. Jerskin Fendrix’s nearly-atonal score, which sounding like classical snippets designed by avant-garde A.I., played by automatons on faulty pump organs or badly-tuned guitars, accomplishes the same distancing feat more efficiently.

Poor Things is a meticulously-created world, a twisted Victorian fairy tale set inside a fanciful snow globe. Gleefully disdaining polite manners and amoral on its surface, it gradually develops empathy and posits one value as supreme above all: freedom of choice. Like the Portuguese custard tarts Bella learns to scarf in one bite, Poor Things is incredibly rich.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I’ve heard a few people say that, based on the trailer, Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film, Poor Things, looks too weird for their tastes. To be honest, the trailer made me think this ‘gender-bending Frankenstein’, as it’s being sold, looked too weird for my tastes… It is weird, no doubt. But it is the sort of weird we can do. And not so weird that I had to Google it afterwards.”–Deborah Ross, The Spectator (contemporaneous)