DIRECTED BY: W.D. Richter

FEATURING: Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli

PLOT: We are first introduced to Buckaroo Banzai as he rushes by helicopter from completing a delicate neurosurgery to test-drive a trans-dimensional race car in the Nevada desert. Banzai successful breaches the Eighth Dimension with his oscillation overthruster, but the experiment attracts the attention of the mad Dr. Lizardo, as well as a gang of Lectroid aliens who also want the device. Between rock and roll gigs and particle physics press conferences, Buckaroo and his band of scientist/musician/adventurers, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, will uncover an alien conspiracy that (naturally) threatens the fate of the world.

BACKGROUND:

• This was writer W.D. Richter’s first directorial effort after having half-a-dozen screenplays produced (including the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Banzai eventually became a hit on VHS but was a huge flop in theaters, losing six million dollars and bankrupting the production studio. Richter only directed one other movie, the 1991 independent comedy Late for Dinner, although he continued to write screenplays (including Big Trouble in Little China). Richter did not write the script for Buckaroo Banzai, however; it was penned by his pal Earl Mac Rauch.
• The name of the evil front corporation in Banzai, Yoyodyne, is a reference to a fictional corporation that appears in Thomas Pynchon’s novels.
• In 2003 Entertainment Weekly ranked Buckaroo Banzai as the #43 cult movie of all time.
• The sequel promised by the end credits, Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League, was of course never made, although legend has it that Richter is still trying to get it produced to this day. In 1998 pre-production work was done on a Buckaroo television series for the Fox network, but the show was never picked up. The Buckaroo brand has persisted through the years with a novelization and comic book adaptations.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: We require a flashback to show how the Eighth Dimension was originally discovered by a then-sane Dr. Emilio Lizardo—but how to introduce it without disrupting the flow of the story? This movie believes the most natural way to incorporate the memory is to have a now-insane Dr. Lizardo hook electrodes onto his tongue and shock himself so that arcs of lightning fly out of his eardrums. We have to assume this bizarre home-electroshock therapy explains the perfect cinematic precision of the following flashback sequence, because no other sane theory is offered for Lizardo’s act of high-voltage masochism.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Refer to the plot synopsis. Any movie that successfully incorporates

Original trailer for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension

a band of rock and roll scientists, an invasion by aliens uniformly named “John,” the Eighth Dimension, inexplicable watermelons, and Jeff Goldblum as a New Jersey neurosurgeon who dresses like a cowboy—while working inside the Hollywood system, with a $12 million dollar budget—has worked hard enough to deserve a space on the List of the Best Weird Movies ever made.

COMMENTS: According to an unofficial Buckaroo Banzai FAQ, the most frequently asked question about The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai is not, as one might expect, “what in the hell did I just watch?” or “how in the world did this thing get made?” or even “why does Jeff Goldblum dress up like a cowboy if he’s from New Jersey?” but instead, “what exactly is the watermelon doing there?” To those not yet in the know, this query refers to the point in the movie where alien John Bigboote has infiltrated the Banzai Institute to try to re-kidnap Professor Hikita and obtain the overthruster, and Buckaroo and the Hong Kong Cavaliers are prowling the corridors looking for him. As they pass through one lab area, New Jersey asks Reno why there is a large watermelon lodged in an industrial vice. “I’ll tell you later,” promises the senior Cavalier, but he never gets around to it.

No one ever wonders about the fact that, in the very same sequence, Buckaroo passes a fire that’s inexplicably burning in a file cabinet and makes no comment—he simply shuts it with his foot, not even bothering to put out the flames. Nobody asks “what exactly is that spinning plastic musical elephant carousel doing in the middle of a hallway in Yoyodyne corporation?” There are lots of unanswered questions in Buckaroo Banzai—why does Lizardo shock himself on the tongue? Why do good aliens appear as Rastafarians?—but people focus on the watermelon because that’s the point at which the movie draws attention to its own background craziness and pledges to answer one single absurdity. Of course, it never delivers the promised resolution, because this is a case of Buckaroo‘s script explicitly tipping you off to the entire story’s shaggy dog nature. Pressed by fans, director W.D. Richter later concocted an explanation which involved the Banzai Institute working to create a watermelon with a super-hard shell so that the fruit could be clandestinely dropped from airplanes into starvation-plagued regions of third world dictatorships without shattering. A likely explanation; but I have my own little theory about the watermelon, which I’ll provide later in the review.

It’s fruitless to obsess about the watermelon, because large swaths of Buckaroo Banzai make little sense. If you’re not hopelessly confused half an hour into this picture, then you haven’t been paying attention. The script seems to have been edited down from something about three times as long, with subplots that are hinted at but not followed up on and characters who are mentioned but never appear. There’s simply not enough time in the 100 minutes allotted to flesh out all the ideas Richter and Rauch are anxious to get on the page, so the plot rushes by with a heedless recklessness that sweeps you along. Buckaroo has a love interest in the charming person of Penny Priddy, who by a freak coincidence happens to be the spitting image of his dead wife, but he’s so busy dealing with subplots and shootouts he barely has time to romance her between abductions. We never get time to draw a bead on any of Buckaroo’s boon companions and backing band, the Hong Kong Cavaliers. They have names like Reno Nevada and Rawhide, but few distinguishing characteristics beyond uncanny competence and killer chops (both instrumental and karate). Of the Cavaliers, Lewis Smith makes the biggest impression as “Perfect Tommy,” but that’s largely because of his improbably blond mane of hair. With all of these guys standing around in the background just waiting for their moment in the sun, Buckaroo goes out and recruits yet another sidekick who demands his share of screen time, in the person of fellow neurosurgeon named New Jersey, who dresses inconspicuously in a cowboy hat, bright scarlet shirt and shaggy llama-hair chaps. There’s also a helpful Jamaican alien who joins the fray, and a father-son pair of Buckaroo Banzai Irregulars who chip in to put the beatdown on evil. And as if this weren’t enough, the characters reference other characters who never made it into the final script, like Cavalier Pecos (who we’re told is in Tibet).

This colorful army of good guys is opposed by an even more colorful gang of alien miscreants. (Keep in mind that the good aliens are Black Lectroids, and they come from Planet Ten and say “hey mon,” while the bad aliens are Red Lectroids who hail from the Eighth Dimension and carry guns that shoot spiders—got it?) A pair of fine character actors in Dan Hedaya and the angular Vincent Schiavelli are bumbling, none-too-bright foot soldiers in the alien army. The Red Lectroids’ chief lieutenant, John Bigboote (pronounced, he is anxious to remind everyone, “Bigboo-tay,” not “Big-booty”) is memorably portrayed by the great Christopher Lloyd (fresh off his stint as Reverend Jim on “Taxi”). But it’s John Lithgow as Dr. Lizardo (who, we figure out after multiple viewings, is possessed by the spirit of a Red Lectroid named John Whorfin) who steals the show. With bad teeth and an even worse Italian accent, Lizardo is prone to rambling lines like “we’re home free… home is where you wear your hat… I feel so break up, I want to go home!” and “laugh-a while you can, monkey boy!” Lithgow rants like Chico Marx with a God complex and slinks around like Ygor in a Frankenstein movie. Lithgow’s performance throws both good taste and sanity out the window, and he gets more into the spirit of the material than anyone else involved in the production.

Peter Weller, by comparison, is totally deadpan, and to me this is the movie’s greatest flaw. His coolness certainly contrasts with Lithgow’s craziness, but for a guy who’s a combination secret agent and rock star, he shows little charisma, just a bland handsomeness. Weller’s restrained, somewhat arrogant persona is perfect for Robocop, or for the emotionally shut-down writer William Lee in Naked Lunch, but he lacks the spark to portray a larger than life character like Buckaroo. We’ll never know how the film would have played out with a more vigorous Banzai—maybe it would have pumped the movie up too much, to the point where it exploded—but I would have loved to see what would have happened had Weller and Jeff Goldblum’s roles been switched. Goldblum is underutilized as a gimmicky sidekick, and it seems the lead role could have benefited from the nervous energy he brings to the screen.

Halfway through the movie, Banzai recaps the plot thus far for the President of the United States. The Prez’ bemused reaction speaks for the audience: “Buckaroo, I don’t know what to say. Lectroids, Planet 10, nuclear extortion, a girl named John…” There’s another quote near the beginning of the movie that’s even more to the point, considering this venue. Buckaroo has just performed neurosurgery and penetrated solid matter by accessing the Eighth Dimension. He caps off the evening by headlining at a nightclub, soloing on electric guitar, trumpet and piano. He stops in the middle of a rollicking blues number, having psychically sensed that someone in the audience isn’t having a good time. In fact, the stick in the mud is a depressed woman who’s “down to her last nickel in this lousy town.” Buckaroo tries to cheer her up by putting a spotlight on her, advising her that “wherever you go, there you are,” and launching into a cover version of that comforting ballad “Since I Don’t Have You.” As Buckaroo sits at the piano and croons, “I don’t have plans or schemes, I don’t have hopes or dreams” to the sobbing suicidal gal with smeared mascara, one of the backup saxophonists turns to another and says, “This is weird.” To which his companion says, “Sure is.” To which I would have responded, “You’re just noticing that now?”

By the way, the reason that they put a watermelon in the vice is because a grape wouldn’t have shown up on camera.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Richter doesn’t bring out the baroque lunacy of the material—a kind of fermented parody of M*A*S*H, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and the TV series ‘The A-Team’—but though the characters don’t develop and the laughs don’t build or come together, the film’s uninflected deadpan tone is somehow likable.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

“…like coming into the middle chapters of some hilariously overplotted, spaced-out 1930′s adventure serial, neither the beginning nor the end of which ever comes into sight. At its best, which it frequently is, it’s a lunatic ball…pure, nutty fun.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Some movies become cult classics by being bad in a charming and/or entertaining way, some by being transgressive in ways mainstream society isn’t prepared to deal with, others by just being flat-out weird. I submit, with great fondness, that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension, belongs to the latter category.”–Danny Bowes, Tor.com (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE: MGMs Official Site for the Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai – Basically, a one-page ad to buy the film with a trailer, synopsis, cast list and some stills. Of course, most movies this old aren’t given even that much attention by major studios.

IMDB LINK: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

BANZAI INSTITUTE – This repository of news items and trivia is written in a style similar enough to the DVD supplemental material (e.g., referring to the movie as a “docudrama”) that you halfway suspect director Richter and/or writer Rauch is behind the site

Banzai Institute – Facebook – From the makers of the above site, now conveniently on Facebook for more frequent updates

World Watch Online: The Buckaroo Banzai Mailing List – Another Buckaroo Banzai fan site. There’s a wealth of archived material here for fans to plow through, including downloadable newsletters dating back to 1985!

NYFF: Buckaroo Banzai Intro + Q&A – Complete question and answer session with Peter Weller and John Lithgow, hosted by Kevin Smith at the 2011 New York Film Festival (this YouTube video is over an hour long)

Buckaroo Banzai Frequently Asked Questions – Almost all the Buckaroo minutiae that you would ever want can be found in this online FAQ

Yoyodyne.com – A fake website for the fake corporation in Buckaroo Banzai. Why? The Banzai fan base is just that thorough. You may use this site to email John Bigboote, should you wish.

Rotten Tomatoes Show: Top 5 Aborted Franchises – The Rotten Tomatoes Show names Buckaroo Banzai the top aborted franchise of all time, explaining that it was “a tad to weird for America”

Buckaroo Banzai: Across The 8th Dimension, The Adventures of Easter Eggs – information on accessing the hidden features on the Buckaroo Banzai DVD

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

“The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension: The Novel”- Scriptwriter Earl Mac Rauch’s 1984 novelization of the movie, which adds much-needed backstory and supplemental material to flesh out the legend

“Buckaroo Banzai: Return Of The Screw” – A 2007 Rauch-penned graphic novel continuing Buckaroo’s adventures

DVD INFO: MGM’s 2002 Special Edition of Banzai (buy) did this cult classic right and thrilled even the movie’s demanding fan base. The commentary track features Richter and Rauch, with the director pretending the film is a biopic of a real life figure and Rauch pretending to be one of the Hong Kong Cavaliers. An optional subtitle track serves up additional tidbits of information about the Banzai universe. Many deleted scenes are included, most notably one where Jamie Lee Curtis plays Buckaroo’s mom in a flashback. There’s a 22-minute featurette called “Buckaroo Banzai Declassified” with Richter which, like the commentary track, stays in character, pretending Buckaroo is real. Character profiles provide even more background information on the Banzai mythology, and photo galleries, promotional materials and the original trailer round out a treasury of special features.

Banzai is also the weirdest offering on MGM’s 3 disc “Astronomy 101″ collection (buy), which also contains the mildly weird Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Mel Brooks’ not-so-weird (but inexplicably popular) Star Wars spoof Spaceballs.

Buckaroo Banzai is not yet available on Blu-ray, though it seems like a likely candidate for an upgrade. It is available on Video-on-Demand, for rental only (rent on demand).

(This movie was nominated for review by multiple readers.  Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Chris Marker

FEATURING: Jean Négroni (narrator), Davos Hanich, Hélène Chatelain (models)

PLOT: After World War III, a man is trained as a time traveler to try to find a cure for the

devastation, but he is more interested in locating the woman on a pier whom he briefly glimpsed as a child and whose image burned itself into his memory.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: La Jetée has all the cinematic quality it would need to qualify for the List, and a significant enough level of weirdness to justify inclusion. The film’s only drawback is its length; at a mere 30 minutes, it would need to be ghost-of-Hunter-S.-Thompson-on-a-peyote-trip bizarre in order to take a spot on the List away from a movie that’s three or four times its length. It is, however, a historically important film with links to lots of other weird movies, and any serious student of cinematic surrealism should be sure the name “La Jetée” at least rings a bell.

COMMENTS: The credits introduce La Jetée not as a film, but as a photo-roman (photo-novel). Filmmaker Chris Marker made this experiment, his only significant fiction film, between his usual essay-style documentaries; the story is told entirely through still photographs (with one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it motion sequence), third-person narration, and sound effects. The technique is surprisingly effective and remarkably cinematic, and it dovetails with the movie’s theme of memory; each image is itself like one of the nameless hero’s stored memories, which he accesses as if he’s browsing an interior museum. Sometimes the pictures fit together in sequence to compose a fragmented scene, and other times they make giant leaps into the future or past, in the same way that the mind jumps back and forth between present and past as it composes reality in real time. The story is vague in its details—we get no information about the war that nearly destroyed the world, and the potentially troubling etiquettes of romancing a woman across a gulf of time are glossed over—but we accept the fabulous story more easily and focus on its emotional and intellectual messages better without a lot of distracting exposition. The tale becomes disoriented and dreamlike once we reach the time travel experiments; our hero is doped up, mainlining time (which washes over him and lifts him like a wave), and he drifts through timeless moments with his beloved mistress of the past. “They have no memories, no plans,” the narrator tells us as the couple discovers romance in their own particular dimension. “Time builds itself painless around them.” Every so often we are brought back to the present and see the subject’s sleeping face covered by a mask, hear indistinct whispering in a foreign tongue and the sound of a beating heart. It’s as if he’s lying on an operating table hallucinating; we’re reminded that in this reverie he can’t clearly distinguish whether he’s dreaming, remembering, or experience. When he travels into the future, he wears sunglasses and discovers that citizens of the weird world to come have buttons on their foreheads and are fond of becoming partially transparent and appearing in front of celestial fields. The vague and dreamy middle portion sharpens its focus for the ending, which brings us, Möbius-strip fashion, back to the beginning so the hero can relive that moment where he first glimpsed the girl on the pier who would become his lifelong obsession. The famous ending isn’t so much what we think of as a typical time-travel paradox as it is an anti-paradox; the way the plot points connect so perfectly, so artificially, so ironically, is unsettling. La Jetée emerges as a fascinting narrative meditation—though unfortunately the ending has lost some of its punch-in-the-gut impact for today’s viewer, who’s been exposed to so many variations on Marker’s final twist that it now plays out like a cliché. Fortunately, there is much more to marvel at in this trip deep into the abysses of mind and memory than just its trick ending; it’s an utterly unique film experience that serious science fiction fans (in particular) will want to savor and remember.

La Jetée was explicitly expanded and remade by Terry Gilliam as 12 Monkeys (1995), but it could almost be said that every time travel film made since 1962 (including Terminator) is at least an oblique remake of Marker’s fantasia. La Jetée cinematically quotes Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, another film about the destructive consuming power of memory, and has itself been visually referenced in numerous weird movies, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). The Criterion Collection presents the short on a gala disc alongside Marker’s next most famous film, the maddeningly wandering documentary travelogue Sans Soleil.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Every philosophically inclined Möbius-strip narrative that came after ‘La Jetée’—from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to the Terminator trilogy, Somewhere in Time and Lost Highway—is in its debt.”–Matt Zoller Seitz, Time Out New York (DVD)

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.

Alien Terror (1971) (AKA) Sinister Invasion is one of the oddest of Boris Karloff‘s final six movies, but it’s hardly the most exciting. It begins with typical Sixties screen credit font and pseudo jazz that sounds like it was composed for period porn.

Boris is Professor Mayer, and he and his scarred (Ygor-like) assistant Isabel (Maura Monti) are playing around with some power ray thingamajig. It shoots through the roof and hits a spaceship which just happens to be flying by and looks like one of those rocket invader ships from the old Atari arcade games. You half expect this to be some kind of lost Adventures of Superman episode and sense that at any moment some green Martian is going to show up.  Alas, all that shows up is Laura (Christa Linder), the professor’s niece; she is having a fit because her uncle has just blown another hole in the roof.

The guys in the fly by UFO are not so forgiving. They realize that those Earthers possess a mighty power that could annihilate the universe. So, of course they must do something in order to stop us. Their solution is something akin to a Plan 8 from Outer Space, which makes about as much sense as Plan 9 did. One of the E.T.s, a foppy Buck Rogers type (Sergio Kleiner), steps out of  a really cool, psychedelic spaceship (complete with lava lamp things inside) and possesses serial sex murderer Thomas ( Yerye Beirute). Why would he do that, you may ask? Well, obviously it’s the only way for an alien to stop Earthers from using their molecular power ray thingamajig (!)

The only problem is that Thomas still has half of his own mind and he kills a few too many girls, arousing the anger of the villagers (one of the villager is even named Frankenstein. Get it?) There are some odd touches amidst an entirely nonsensical film. One of Thomas’ victims actually loves her serial killer hero, fully knowing of his psychopathic tendencies. The alien, when it’s not looking like Barry Manilow in aluminum foil, takes on the shape of a floating transparent tribble that possesses both the professor and his niece.

Karloff  has a bit of screen time in this, his last released film (he died two years before). He looks slightly better here and he is the only decent actor in the entire cast, although Beirute is an amusingly quirky non-actor. He is known–if you call it that—for this and for his briefer role inFace of the Screaming Werewolf (1966) where he was victim to Lon Chaney Jr.‘s rotund lycanthrope.

After it ends badly for half the cast, the professor destroys this power machine, which we on earth are to too stupid to harness (you can just hear Ed Wood yelling: “stupid! stupid! stupid!”) Alien Terror is no Invisible Ray (which wasn’t that good to begin with) but there is a certain amount of dumb fun to be found here. Just don’t ask me to tell you where exactly—the “magic” is in its overall peculiar flavor. It lacks the blatant drive-in antics of Fear Chamber (1968) and it could have used Ed Wood’s stamp of branded lunacy (!?!).

Still, there is a certain iconic aptness in Boris, like Bela Lugosi, ending his career with some of the weirdest bad move extravaganzas imaginable (or unimaginable). I think Poelzig and Werdegast would have appreciated the perverse irony.

FEATURING: Norimizu Ameya, Yôta Kawase, Mika Kunihiro, Sosuke Saito

PLOT: In the midst of bizarre and intricate top secret drug research, four mad scientists run

low on test subjects and use one another as guinea pigs. Their equipment malfunctions as the team succumbs to the drug’s psychotic effects. The entire experiment spirals horribly out of control, turning the final test subject into a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster—with a unique twist.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: The bizarre story, unconventional filming, and shocking imagery in Rubber’s Lover make it a weird viewing experience, even by the standards of the Japanese cyberpunk genre.

COMMENTS: Kinetic editing and dark, shocking images define this unusual, experimental Japanese horror film. In a modern update to the Frankenstein plot, a team of rogue scientists conduct experimental drug, sensory, and mind control research on abducted human subjects in a secret government torture lab. The results are promising, but they can’t seem to get the dose right; the subjects keep dying. (Who might have predicted that?) Worse, they are running out of hard-to-obtain “patients” and time is running out to conclude experimentation. Their horrifying lab is full of eerie black iron devices and electronics, all maddeningly grotesque in appearance.

Threatened with impending shut-down and loss of grants if they don’t achieve viable results soon, the crazy quartet decides to give their last living human guinea pig a mega dose of their weird drug cocktail. His brain explodes, dosing an assistant by spraying blood on him. Now the assistant is instantly addicted, semi-psychotic, and useless for being anything but, you guessed it, the next test subject.

The researchers fight over which of their two drugs they should test on him, as both have developed competing formulas. One decides to test his drug on his partner, turning the hapless associate into a mad sex offender who then marathon-rapes a female executive sent to shut down their lab. To prevent her leaving and making a bad report (why would she want to do that?) she becomes, yes, yet another unwilling test subject.

A comely lab assistant, (a Lolita Goth, wearing a crotch length doll dress, who keeps her lunch in the specimen cooler and rapes male subjects between experiments), runs around with a giant pneumatic syringe full of the test formula, injecting hapless subjects in the rectum. The mind altering synthetic dope has a synergistic effect with certain audio frequency modulations, and subjects wear a full-head media stimulation hood during the tests. The sound patterns and the drug combo drive them insane. It is a form of experimental torture, yet they beg for more because the procedure makes them higher than they’ve ever been.

When the scientists accidentally ingest the drugs, they become deranged and experiment on each other. The complex equipment which both controls and catalyzes the research breaks down, and the entire project goes haywire, rapidly escalating to pure bedlam (as if things were “normal” up to this point.) As the participants undergo abominable mental and physical changes, it becomes clear that the drug formula is creating nouveau Frankenstein monsters. When the two addled researches struggle to regain control over their hi-tech disaster, the final batch of test serum breaks through a dimensional barrier in a unique way that nobody could have predicted.

Rubber’s Lover is not for everybody. It’s an assault on the senses, and watching it is akin to being caught in a white water rapids. You could wear yourself out trying to fight the current. Instead, you must go limp and let the foaming torrents roll you, twist you, shock you and hopefully deliver you out the bottom of the roaring maelstrom in one piece, exhausted, flabbergasted, but with luck, unharmed.

Rubber’s Lover audiences will be wowed with the successions of images and impressions, alternately clever and repellant, which at once surprise, stun, astound, stupefy, and disgust. Director Shozin Fukui maximizes the rich tonal range of his black and white film stock to cultivate an abundant bouquet of textures, lights and shadows. The result is mood-altering, staggering, and industrial, but never boring.

Rubber’s Lover is an arty, gruesome endurance contest of psychedelic imagery, torture, rape, and general craziness; yet, while wildly over the top, it is not campy, goofy, or insulting to one’s intelligence. (Well, not too much anyway). Given the outrageousness of the plot, this is a difficult balance to achieve, and it’s surprising that the filmmaker pulled it off as well as he did. Rubber’s Lover is a cross between Eraserhead, Men Behind The Sun, Philosophy Of A Knife and Videodrome. Fans of weird cinema may already be familiar with director Shozin Fukui, who brought us the equally bizarre cult film 964 Pinocchio and worked on the crew of the Japanese cyberpunk classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man. For fans of this unusual Japanese horror genre, Rubber’s Lover is a ten star weird-fest all the way.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“From the uninspired surrealism of Ken Russell’s Altered States to the gratuitous gore imagery made infamous by those paisans of puke, the Italians, Rubber’s Lover doesn’t provide a single situation that can’t be found elsewhere. While it may appear novel and new, this film is mining some very old chestnuts in the oeuvre of the awful.”–Bill Gibron, DVD Talk (DVD)

FEATURING: Olivier Rollin (as Oliver Martin), Maurice Lemaître, Caroline Cartier, Ursule Pauly, Catherine Castel (as Cathy Tricot), Marie-Pierre Castel (as Pony Tricot), Michel Delahaye

PLOT: A young man discovers his father has kidnapped a vampire and is studying her in hopes

of learning the secret of immortality.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: As we explained in our review of Shiver of the Vampires, we’re expecting to add one of Jean Rollin’s surreal erotic vampire films to the List (though we’re open to the possibility of more than one making it). We want to consider all of the director’s major horror works first, however, before picking the best movie to represent Rollin’s arty and irrational vampire vision. 1973′s Shiver showed a notable improvement in Rollins’ technical filmmaking skills, but Nude, with its suicide cult and multi-dimensional twist ending, holds a slight edge as being the more delirious film. Compared to Shiver, Nude is amateur and raw, but this may be a case where worse is better—or at least, weirder.

COMMENTS: The Nude Vampire opens with a scene of a hooded woman stripped naked in a laboratory by other hooded figures; they take a sample of her blood. Next we find ourselves following a woman slinking through oddly deserted Paris streets in a sheer orange negligee. She’s carefully and quietly followed by men wearing animal masks: a chicken, a bull, some sort of cross between a frog and an insect, and a lavender stag with enormous, impractical horns rising from his head. She meets a strange man outside the Metro and touches his face; together they flee the masked cultists, until the stag-man catches up with her and shoots her on a bridge. Oh, and this entire 8 minute introductory sequence contains no dialogue, just atonal free jazz explorations, first from a wailing baritone sax and then from a screeching violin. If you’re not at least a little intrigued by that opening, well then, you may be browsing the wrong site. Nude tantalizingly rides the fine line between sense (the plot points do connect from one to the next) and nonsense (the entire premise of a suicide cult kidnapping a mutant transdimensional vampire is preposterous). Some scenes are exquisitely haunting: the stag-man standing on cobblestone streets, the slow torchlit march of the undead. Other scenes are staged with an embarrassing amateurism, as when a woman committing suicide fails to react on time to a badly dubbed gunshot to her own temple; or, when two miniskirted women are killed after a third waves a torch in their general direction, causing them to roll themselves down a flight of stairs (flashing their white panties as they work their way around a bend in the staircase) in a way that defies the physics of murder.  From moment to moment the movie could be categorized as either a pretentious student art film or a bad b-movie fever dream (scenes where topless dancers gyrate before businessmen wearing avant-garde pasties weave both strands into one variegated thread). The result of these competing elements is an ambiguous style that makes the distinction between “good” and “bad” irrelevant. Moments of brilliance and flubs are both subsumed into the atmosphere of general weirdness. There’s always something new popping up on screen to raise your eyebrows, like the sexy twin assistants whose favored uniforms are scale mail miniskirts with mobiles covering their breasts, a nude model who goes into a spontaneous interpretative dance, and a suddenly sci-fi ending that might remind you of Phantasm (1979). You’ll sympathize with the minor character who, near the end of the movie, asks the rhetorical question “do you understand any of this?” Rollin’s films failed financially in their day because they proved too pretentious for general horror fans and too exploitative for arthouse patrons, but today they hit the sweet spot for cult movie enthusiasts who crave utter unpredictability in their scare flicks.

Although it’s not chaste by any stretch, there is less sex and nudity in this production than would show up going forward in Rollin’s oeuvre. In the interest of truth in advertising, the movie should have been titled The Vampire in the See-through Nightie. (That is, if she is a vampire at all…)

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strange work of conspiracy, family rebellion, and innocence imprisoned, both a vampire film and a strange science fiction fantasy…”–Sean Axmaker, Parallax View (Rollin retrospective)

DIRECTED BY: Takeshi Koike

FEATURING: Takuya Kamura, Yû Aoi, Tadanobu Asano

PLOT: Set in a distant future and moving between multiple planets, this is a fairly simple tale of

a major road race taking place on a militaristic planet that doesn’t want it there.  Racers “Sweet” JP, the big-haired underdog, and Sonoshee, a single-minded gearhead, are the main focus of the story.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Armed with an eclectic cast of alien characters and a host of over-the-top shenanigans, Redline might come off as “weird” to someone unfamiliar with anime, but I’d say the stranger humor and visuals fit in pretty squarely with other properties of the genre.  It’s an imaginative and enormously entertaining film, just not especially Weird.

COMMENTS:  The future laid out in Redline is certainly an intriguing one, if completely ludicrous.  Hot shot reckless racer JP makes it to the titular big interstellar race, held on a militaristic planet that hasn’t consented to be the host.  He cozies up to Sonoshee, a cute green-haired lady who is one of the most serious and intimidating drivers there, and together the two attempt to navigate a strange obstacle course against alien competitors (some with inexplicable magic powers) and large-scale weaponry.  Squeezing in ESPN-like profiles of various racers—from an experienced cyborg who’s fused himself with his machine to a pair of scantily clad pop stars hailing from a magical princess planet—there’s some room for satire, too.

This movie is essentially all spectacle and adrenaline, with very little comprehensible or meaningful plot holding it together, but it’s not like the filmmakers are operating under any pretense of depth.  They’ve created a gorgeously animated, pumped-up sci-fi thriller, and that’s all that’s needed!  The characters are slick, and the vehicle designs slicker, with plenty of exaggerated personalities and colorful attachments for an engaging race line-up.  Sure, there’s a silly romantic/secret-past subplot thrown in there, but it’s never taken very seriously.  Various secondary stories are introduced, such as the military planet’s worker resistance and JP’s involvement in race-fixing, but the race itself remains the focus and it’s easy to forget that anything else is going on (the script certainly seems to by the end).  The set-up can be confusing at times due to an influx of minor characters and limited explanation of the obviously complex political and environmental structures.

The strengths of Redline lie almost completely in its visuals and fast pacing.  The dark shading and bright color schemes, the over-the-top hair styles and imaginative alien creatures, the quick-cut-editing and crazy landscapes: it’s all fantastically sweet eye-candy, set to an ecstatic musical score.  It’s violent but fun, and there’s probably political commentary thrown in there somewhere.  The script is cheesy at points, but vaguely self-aware.  It’s just a very cool movie all around, rarely letting up for a moment in its quest to assault the senses with psychedelic imagery and revving engines.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“One of the most visually spectacular toons in recent years, pic is a thumping ride for fanboys, but the script’s underdeveloped central romance and the fizzling out of intriguing plot threads will impede wider acceptance… [Plays] like a twisted combo of “Death Race 2000,” “Speed Racer” and a ’50s hot-rod movie on steroids…”–Variety (contemporaneous)

Content Warning: This short contains brief drug use and violence.

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.)

FEATURING: Spike Spencer, Allison Keith-Shipp (English dub)

PLOT:  Following the events of Evangelion 1.11, the Angel incursions against Tokyo-3 increase

in intensity, and two new teenage Evangelion pilots are integrated into the NERV defense team.  Also, the world ends, I think.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  What to do with Evangelion?  A combo teen soap opera/end-of-the-world saga starring giant robots, the series is weird, but in a way that’s actually sort of conventional (in anime terms).  Even worse, there are now four movies (and a long running TV series) telling essentially the same story—with two more on the way.  Should all the movies make the List?  None?  Only the weirdest one?  Whatever the case, I don’t think this installment is capable of being counted among the best weird movies ever made; but I’m also thankful we get to defer the issue until we’ve checked out the series’ entire run.

COMMENTS:  Here’s a typical battle between an Angel (periodically appearing bad guy) and an Evangelion (giant robot that can only be piloted by a teenager).  Battleships fire pink and yellow shells at the Angel, a wire-frame robot with a pendulum hanging between its legs, as it marches towards them, instantly freezing the blood red sea with every stride and leaving a huge snowflake as a footstep.  It shoots laser beams from a globe and blows the battleships, causing the scarlet water to erupt into cross-shaped spouts.  A warplane drops a giant robot (hereafter “Eva”); it evades the green-tipped black lines the Angel fires at it as it falls.  The Eva blows up the Angel with a gun, but it immediately reconstitutes itself.  The Eva next stomps on the Angel’s laser-firing spike, which causes translucent pink and yellow auras to fill up the sky.  Eventually the Eva’s foot forces the spike all the way into its command globe, and the Angel explodes into a pink cross.  Each melee shot lasts for a second or less, increasing the confusion as to what the hell is supposed to be going on.  In Evangelion Angels can take any form, including scuttling robots with dinosaur-skull heads and 1970s-era Pink Floyd laser light shows, and they operate according to rules that are never explained.  (I’m fairly sure the Angels have no actual protocols or limitations—they simply perform whatever act the director thinks will look most awesome at the moment).  The fight scenes are psychedelically beautiful; but the overall plot is about as muddled as an Eva/Angel smackdown.  Viewers hoping for clarification on what the Angels (or the Evas, for that matter) actually are should steel themselves for further confusion and hints of biblical conspiracy instead.  By way of exposition, NERV chief and jerkwad pop Gendo explains, “Our only desire is the true Evangelion.  It’s awakening will coincide with the resurrection of Lilith and usher in the Time of the Covenant. It is crucial that the necessary rites be performed by then, for the sake of the Human Instrumentality Project.”  As wimpy teen hero Shinji responds after his father delivers a generically profound—but in on way on-target—speech about sacrificing for your dreams, “You say that, but I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean.”  You also may not even know what scraps of dialogue like “I prefer the living chaos of man, instead of this barren wasteland of death” and “it’s transcending the boundaries of humanity!” are supposed to mean, either.  It’s easier to follow the soap opera side of the story, which in this second installment explores a developing love triangle between emo Shinji, mysteriously catatonic, blue-haired Rei, and brash newcomer Asuka, a blue-eyed, Japan-insulting American hottie with a love-hate thing for Shinji and a hate-hate thing for Rei.  Complicating the sexual dynamic is the fact that Shinji is terrified of the fairer sex.  And you would be too, if you were him: naked women kickbox him in the head, and when he’s just minding his own business random babes parachute down from the sky and smother him with their cleavage.  Although Shinji has grown up a tiny amount since the prior episode, and no longer spends the entire movie moping in his room, his shameless self-absorption in his morass of daddy issues is still the primary obstacle for adults (and well-adjusted teens) to enjoying the series.  How can you root for a character who refuses to stop the apocalypse because he’s off throwing a tantrum?  If you’re in tune with anime conventions, or only crave eye candy and fanservice, you’ll see Evangelion as a paragon of the art form.  It’s not a crossover series that will entice the average adult viewer, however.

I originally understood this second cinematic version of the Evangelion saga was to be a straightforward quartet, but according to Twitch’s Ard Vijn (who knows a lot more about these things than I do), the reality is far stranger.  First, despite the unanswered questions, the storyline is apparently complete with this second film (!)  Secondly, there will be two more episodes, which will cover the same events, but from different characters perspectives (!!)  Sometimes I can’t decide whether I’m more confused watching an Evangelion movie, or trying to sort out the chronology and canonicity of this sprawling franchise.  The series seems to be stuck in a perpetual reboot cycle.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is a fever dream for sure, but one that has been lovingly embellished with details and technically polished until it has become its own weird-yet-beautiful thing.”–Ard Vijn, Twitch (DVD)