DIRECTED BY: Paul Bartel

FEATURING: Ayn Ruymen, Lucille Benson, John Ventantonio

PLOT: A sexually curious teenage runaway negotiates the deviant scumbags in her crazy

aunt’s creaky boarding house.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  It might make the List thanks to the atmosphere of sleazy psychosexual depravity that’s slathered on thicker than the blue eye shadow teenage Cheryl cakes on to try to make herself look like a woman.

COMMENTS: Private Parts is a haunted  house movie, except that the ghosts bedeviling the heroine are the bizarre, boozy boarders at her aunt’s decrepit hotel, and she’s not nearly as wary of them as she need to be.  This is a movie full of creaking floorboards, turning doorknobs, and unseen men peeping through knotholes in a dusty old hotel.  Adding to the atmosphere is a wonderfully overwrought Bernard Hermann-inspired soundtrack that’s with us so constantly that it actually creates tension when it disappears for a moment to allow the characters to speak.  Not that what this collection of skid-row oddballs has to say would be particularly reassuring.  We have the Reverend, who at one point suggests he should slip out of his clerical vestments into something more comfortable; the spooky old hag who calls young Cheryl “Alice” after a resident who disappeared a long time ago under suspicious circumstances; and there’s the hotelier herself, Aunt Martha, who loves funerals, hates painted women and believes “the body is a prison.”  There’s also George, the silent young photographer with the darkroom in the basement and the creepy stare that focuses on pubescent Cheryl whenever she’s in the room.  Each of these weirdos has deeper secrets in their closets, which Cheryl will uncover when she starts snooping around their rooms against her Aunt’s orders (hint to future runaways: you should never trust a guy who owns a customized carrying case for his personal syringe).  Obviously, this is no place for a naïf like Cheryl, but she’s not oblivious to the degeneracy—she’s actively drawn to it.  Curious about sex but totally inexperienced, she enjoys the feel of a grown man’s eyes on her developing body, without understanding the difference between healthy lust and sick perversion.  All she knows is, after receiving presents of erotica and spiderweb lingerie from a secret admirer, boys her own age suddenly seem boring.  Although the movie sports a body count, the tension comes from hoping Cheryl will somehow escape what seems to be her inevitable seduction and corruption.  If IMDB is to be believed, Ayn Ruymen was 25 years old when she played the part, but you may have a hard time believing the actress is a day over 16.  Not only does she have an adolescent build, she plays the part with a wonderful mix of innocent naughtiness; she mischievously snoops and pranks the boarders, but still sleeps with a teddy bear and isn’t half as sophisticated as she thinks.  The bits with a bizarre, customizable “blow up” doll are unforgettably creepy.  After playing as straight psychohorror through most of the running time, Private Parts takes a strange detour into black comedy territory for the conclusion with the arrival of a couple of ludicrously blasé cops, and throws out a couple of scarcely believable twists at the very end as the weird capper.  All told, Private Parts a deliciously depraved debut from oddball Paul Bartel.

Private Parts is a should-be cult movie that’s still searching for its cult forty years after release.  For some reason, MGM picked the movie up for distribution, then apparently balked at the pseudo-pedophiliac subject matter and buried the movie.  The flick has been consistently overlooked since; those who caught it in its brief theatrical run or stumbled upon its unheralded VHS or DVD releases remember it, but word of mouth has never made it a hit, despite its midnight movie feel and pleasing perversity.  Ironically, director Paul Bartel received more exposure making films like Death Race 2000 for Roger Corman (Roger’s brother Gene was producer on Private Parts) than he with this Hollywood debut.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…for pure excess and surreal humor, it’s something of a minor pop art masterpiece; a careful blending of the eccentric and the sleazy, very much akin to other midnight revival mainstays like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and the ’70s films of John Waters, with a wickedly unique take on repressed desire and secret shame.”–Paul Corupe, DVD Verdict (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Gerby” who called it “a strange one!” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Darren Aronofsky

FEATURING: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder

PLOT:  Nina, a goody two-shoes ballerina, wants to dance the lead role in a production of “Swan Lake,” but although she’s perfect for the role of the White Swan, she lacks the seductiveness to portray the Black Swan.  Lily, a sexy, irresponsible dancer newly arrived from a San Francisco troupe, becomes her primary competition for the part, but also helps her loosen up by talking her out on the town for a night of drinking and meeting guys.  Nina starts physically break down and hallucinate as the stress of preparing for the role takes its toll; by opening night, she can’t distinguish reality from the story she dances of the princess trapped in the body of a swan who takes her own life.

BACKGROUND:

• Natalie Portman danced many of her own parts, and actually dislocated a rib while dancing during the shoot.  More difficult moves were performed by professional ballerinas, and for two sequences Portman’s face was digitally superimposed on dancer Sarah Lane’s body.  There was a minor controversy over how much of the dancing Portman actually did herself and how much was performed by doubles; Aronofsky estimated that the actress executed more than 80% of the dance moves that appear onscreen.
• Portman won the 2010 Best Actress Oscar for her role as Nina.  The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography and Editing.
• Aronofsky received “The Understudy,” the original script that became Black Swan, while he was making Requiem for a Dream (2000).  He described the script as Dostoevsky’s “The Double” meets All About Eve.  Aronofsky combined that script, which was set in an off-Broadway production, with an idea he had to shoot a movie in the New York ballet world to create Black Swan.
• Aronofsky and Portman had discussed doing a ballet movie together 8 years prior to shooting.
• Made on a relatively small budget of about $12 million, Black Swan has grossed more than $300 million worldwide as of this writing.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Nina’s “triumphant” onstage transformation into the Black Swan: as she pirouettes, feathers sprout from her arms, thickening with every swirl, until her limbs have been replaced by wings.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Up until opening night, Black Swan is a backstage melodrama

“Music Video” for Black Swan

about backstabbing ballerinas, with an exaggerated, lurid psychopathology that’s thrust even further over-the-top by lesbian love scenes, hints of horror, and mirrors, mirrors, mirrors.  When the curtain rises on the big night, we experience the performance through the subjective perspective of an overworked, paranoid, demented dancer, whose psychology has been shattered by the film’s sledgehammer symbolism.  No avant-grade choreographer could stage as disorienting a “Swan Lake” as the one she hallucinates for us through her obsessed eyes.

COMMENTS: Black Swan is the weirdest movie ever to win a major Academy Award (Natalie Portman’s Best Actress nod).  Swan also received a Best Picture nom, but that was in the recently-expanded field of ten nominees: we’ll never know if a movie where the protagonist hallucinates and metamorphoses into a bird could have made it in the historical field of five, but considering that now-revered classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Brazil have traditionally been considered too outré to be shortlisted, it seems doubtful.  (A Clockwork Orange did manage to get a Best Picture nomination in 1972, but that may have been the Academy’s make-up call for missing the boat so badly on 2001).  For the time being, Black Swan is weird cinema’s most recognized and decorated film, a fact which by itself is enough to make it a Must See feature in the genre.

How does a film where pictures on a wall literally laugh at the heroine, and major plot points may not even happen, worm its way into the ultra-conservative, ultra-literal, historical-epic favoring Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ good graces?  Director Darren Aronofsky, who began his career with the punky, experimental and Certified Weird Pi, ingratiated himself with cinematic conservatives in 2008 with the (excellent) sports drama The Wrestler, proving to the mainstream that he could be “more” than just a technically proficient cult/arthouse director whose tastes ran dangerously close to the surreal.  Building on that success, Arnofsky assembled a classy cast, headlined by Portman, for his followup project.  It didn’t hurt the film’s prestige that it was to be set in the high-art strata of the New York City dance world and feature the music of Tchaikovsky; no one could doubt the film’s serious intent.

Buzz began to build around Black Swan, and particularly around Portman.  At 29, the Israeli-born actress/model was at the peak of her beauty and had already paid her dues in Hollywood, acquitting herself admirably in dozens of roles from the orphaned Lolita of Léon to the lone important female role in the Star Wars prequels without ever having sniffed a major acting award.  Observers noted that Portman studied ballet intensively for six months prior to shooting, becoming an athlete and exhibiting the sort of dedicated physical transformation that makes the Academy sit up and take note.  A more salacious sort of buzz began to form around the reported love scene with sexy co-star Kunis.  Portman, like ballerina Nina, had a perfectionist, goody-two shoes image: she had even put her acting career on hold for four years to pursue a psychology degree at Harvard.  The notion of the Crimson grad locked in a lipstick-lesbian tryst, while arousing interest in itself, had the further virtue of appearing to cast her against type (in fact, the role of prim, perfectionist Nina comported almost perfectly with Portman’s public image).

Portman was thus positioned for success, and the sensual but repressed performance she delivers as Nina is indeed worthy of the Oscar (though if I were voting in 2010, I would have cast my ballot for Jennifer Lawrence’s spunky teenage meth-orphan from Winter’s Bone).  Nina, who’s dedicated her life to dance, is a woman whose sexual development stalled at that precious stage when she first became infatuated with ballerinas, stuffed animals and the color pink.  Uncomfortably, she still calls her mother (a former dancer who now manages her daughter’s career and keeps her a virtual prisoner in their shared apartment) “mommy.”  She demurs questions about whether, in her late twenties, she’s still a virgin, and responds with breathy trepidation to a man’s, a woman’s, and even to her own intimate touch.  Physically, Portman inhabits the delicate but constantly bruised and busted body of a ballerina; she looks natural stretching out in sweats or a tutu, and when an attendant cracks her feet and depresses her strained diaphragm, you believe you’re watching trainer work over an athlete. Her dancing is impressive, not for the technique (which most people won’t be able to judge) but for the confidence she projects when she whirls her way onstage as the Black Swan, her eyes blazing under the dramatic black-feathered eyeshadow with a true performer’s passion.

There are two competing themes in Black Swan: a child-woman’s fear of growing up, and an artist’s need to supplement her technique with passion.  Both paths require sacrifice: she must kill the little girl inside to become a woman, and to reach perfection she must be willing to risk everything for her art. The point at which the two strains meet and harmonize is sex; Nina’s artistic and sexual maturity, while weaving separate melodies, climax together.  As an artist, it’s stressed (actually, it’s rammed down our throats) that Nina’s perfectionism inhibits her perfecting her art; she’s so concerned with proper technique that she’s always thinking about her next move and never able to abandon herself to passion.  Mila Kunis’ Lilly is the opposite; her movements are imprecise but full of natural allure.  It’s the ancient struggle between the rational Apollonian and chaotic Dionysian artistic impulses, between the right brain and the left brain, between the White Swan and the Black, both of which must be balanced and integrated together to produce a meaningful work of art (or a life).  Nina must learn to dance both the White and the Black Swan, and that will involve learning to surrender herself to an artistic passion; essentially, to sexual abandonment. Nina is not a woman; she’s a little girl trying to act pretty for her mother, trapped inside a body she’s yet to come to terms with.  Symbolically, Nina is on the cusp of womanhood; the bizarre and frightening changes her body undergoes, although they may take the form of gooseflesh and webbed toes instead of budding breasts, represent the onset of puberty.  Her sexual maturity and her artistic maturity occur together. Nina’s final act of artistic fulfillment, when she integrates the Black Swan into her personality and performance, occurs via an act of penetration.  The blood staining the lower abdomen of her virginal white tutu comes from her symbolically broken creative hymen.

Black Swan‘s popular and critical success is almost as mysterious as the film’s ambiguous resolution.  The movie seems too exploitative for arthouse crowd, yet nowhere near explicit enough for the grindhouse crowd.  It mixes genres promiscuously; it’s inspired by backstage melodramas, enlivened by horror movie conventions and topped with neo-surrealism.  The category it fits in most comfortably may be “psychological thriller,” yet though there are very few genuine thriller elements in it: unlike genre classics like Jacob’s Ladder or The Machinist, there’s no mystery to be solved by exploring the protagonist’s psychology.  Black Swan works instead as a character study of Nina’s subconscious, and there’s no event in the movie for which it makes much difference whether it takes place in reality or in her imagination.  The tone is deliberate melodrama, and the few critics who didn’t connect with the movie believed that it strayed over the line of exaggerated emotion into pure camp (there were even a few unkind comparisons to Showgirls).  Some found it trashy, although it’s only “trashy” in the tame sense Pauline Kael used the term; but anyone who uses the term “trashy” to insult this film reveals themselves as unqualified to judge great trash.  Black Swan mixes the “high” art of Tchaikovsky, the ballet, and modernist set design with the “low” art of lurid melodrama, horror movie conventions and gratuitous lesbian love scenes.  Like Nina dancing both the virginal White Swan and the seductive Black Swan, the film struts out both its high and low impulses, harmonizing the sublime beauty of art film and the pure passion of genre film into an artistic whole.  At the film’s close, Nina whispers “it’s perfect;” that’s no longer Nina’s, but Aronofsky’s voice we’re hearing.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…full-bore melodrama, told with passionate intensity, gloriously and darkly absurd.”–Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“…vivid and engrossing, teetering between trash and art, a sleek exploitation borrowing from (among others) Fight Club and The Fly, Mulholland Drive and Persona…. [yet i]n the end, for all its imagination and artistry, Aronofsky’s film achieves neither the pristine elegance of the white swan nor the hallucinatory depravity of the black. It fades, instead, to gray.”–Christopher Orr, The Atlantic (contemporaneous)

“Black and white, good and evil, ambition and obsession, delusion and reality are all blended together in this crazy, weird, compelling film, and it’s masterful, inventive storytelling, whether you like the end result or not.”–Kim Voynar, Movie City News (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: Fox Searchlight – Black Swan – Official Site - A very nice site with numerous news items, concept art to download, and several short video featurettes

IMDB LINK: Black Swan (2010)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Interview: Darren Aronofsky On Music, Scares And Gender In Black Swan – This Aronofsky interview by Katey Rich of Cinema Blend is a lot more interesting than the director’s discussion with MTV, even though they don’t discuss the lesbian scene at all

Black Swan | Darren Aronofsky’s Dances with ‘Swan’ – Steve Zeitchik of the Los Angeles Times describes the genesis of Black Swan

Black Swan: The Exhibition: A Black Swan-inspired L.A. art exhibit curated by Dominic Sidhu (who created art used in the film)

Black Swan dance double controversy – Someone thought the hoo-ha over who did most of the dancing in the film was significant enough to deserve an entire Wikipedia article

Darkness and despair: that’s dance on screen – Anticipating the release of Black Swan, The Independent‘s Sarah Hughes runs down the top movies about ballet (even giving a nod to Suspiria)

List Candidate: Black Swan (2010) – Alex Kittle‘s initial take on Black Swan for 366 Weird Movies during its theatrical release

DVD INFO:  The Fox Searchlight DVD (buy) contains a 49-minute documentary featurette, “Black Swan Metamorphosis,” as the only extra (expect a Special Edition release down the road).  The Blu-ray release (buy) adds extra interviews with the actors and also includes the now ubiquitous “digital copy” of the film.  Some of these special features can be previewed at Black Swan‘s official site.

Note that the rental DVD version available from Netflix and other outlets does not contain any special features, unless you consider previews of other attractions “special.” This marketing strategy is increasingly being used by certain studios, notably Fox, in hopes of bolstering sagging DVD sales.

DIRECTED BY: Zeb Haradon

FEATURING: Zeb Haradon, Robin Ballard

PLOT:  A woman carrying groceries is trapped in an elevator with a socially inept graduate student.  Oddly, no one answers when they push the call button, and no one comes for days and weeks on end; even more oddly, her grocery bag is refilled each morning.  As the weeks stretch into months, the mismatched pair—an adult virgin obsessed with anal sex and a reformed slut turned Jesus freak—form a sick symbiotic bond, until the girl undergoes a weird metamorphosis.

BACKGROUND:

• Per director Haradon, the budget for the film was between twenty-five and thirty thousand dollars.
• According to a statement on the official website the main influences on the story were Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” the films of Luis Buñuel (particularly That Obscure Object of Desire and The Exterminating Angel), and Eraserhead.
  
• Although the mouse-stomping scene was faked, the end of the film shows a joke disclaimer that proclaims, “No animals were harmed in the making of this film except for lobsters and mice.”  Haradon received angry mails from animal rights advocates who believed that a mouse was actually killed onscreen.
• Hardon’s followup film was the documentary Waiting for NESARA (2005), about a bizarre UFO cult composed of ex-Mormons.
• The 2008 Romanian film Elevator features a similar dramatic scenario of a young man and woman trapped together in a cargo elevator, but without any surrealistic elements.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Lana, after she inexplicably transforms into a metal/human hybrid.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  By mixing Sartre’s “No Exit” with an ultra-minimalist riff on

Original trailer for Elevator Movie (WARNING: trailer contains profanity and sexual situations)

Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, garnished with large dollops of fantastical sexual depravity and a pinch of body horror, writer/director/star Zeb Haradon created one of the weirder underground movies of recent years. The absurdist script is exemplary, and the simplicity of the one-set scenario means that the movie’s technical deficiencies don’t stick out, and could even add to the oddness.

COMMENTS: I have to start this review of with a confession/apology: when I first reviewed Elevator Movie over a year ago, I gave it a mere three out of five stars and made an indefensible call not to certify it  for inclusion on the List of the 366 best weird movies ever made.  If the truth be told, I wanted to post about the movie that night and was simply too tired at the time to write a full length review, but the excuse I made for overlooking it was as follows: “Unfortunately, in a demanding two character piece that requires top-notch, nuanced dramatic performances to succeed, Haradon’s acting talent isn’t up to the level of his imagination and screenwriting ability.  The resulting film looks like an A- film school final project: it tantalizingly promises more than it’s capable of delivering.”

No doubt, the key blemish on Elevator Movie is the acting.  With one location, two actors, and a heavy reliance on dialogue, the movie feels like a play.  But, as I said originally, although Robin Ballard is passable in the easier role of Lana, Haradon is almost unforgivably subdued as Jim.  Jim is passive, so some of the wimpiness of the characterization is intentional, but when he needs to project a menacing, seething passion subdued under a calm exterior, he can’t pull it off.  Therefore, at times the inherent dramatic conflict tails off into a bland “OK, OK”, just as Jim’s voice does when Lana once again rejects his advances.  There are two many “ums” and pauses in his delivery, which sound less like Jim’s natural speech patterns and more like untutored acting.  And there’s a moment, after Ballard tells Haradon a story about when her uncle saw a vision of Jesus in his feces that his delivery blows what should have been a perfect (if obvious) punchline.

I still stand behind those criticisms; with the right acting talent, Elevator Movie could have been an absolute classic rather than just a fascinating oddity.  But time has proven me wrong in underestimating Elevator Movie; this thing gets into your subconscious and festers there, and its weird incidents linger in the memory long after more technically polished movies have faded away completely.  And sometimes, like lovers, flawed movies become all the more lovable for their flaws, which make them unique.

The basic scenario is simplicity itself—Jim and Lana, two polar opposites, are stuck in an elevator together; impossibly, for months on end.  Lana enters the elevator with a grocery bag, and each morning when the couple awakens the supplies are magically replenished.  The problem of elimination isn’t shied away from; fortunately, whatever entity takes care of the shopping while they sleep also empties the coffee can that holds their mingled waste.  The couple have no television and neither brought an Ipod, so for entertainment they only have each other to converse with.  And so, as the weeks pass, they talk, and talk, and talk.

They talk about God, they talk about their personal histories, they talk about what they would do if they were on the outside, but, as their imprisonment drags on, more and more they talk about Jim’s unusual sexual desires.  Jim, a virgin and a socially inept college student studying genetics, is obsessed with the allure of anal sex.  That’s his primary kink, but not his only one.  The longer we stay trapped in the elevator with Jim, the more we come to realize what a sick puppy he truly is.  Early on, on their very first day of captivity, he confesses his dream project to Lana: he wants to genetically engineer a Venus flytrap that’s capable of performing fellatio.

As the days mount, Jim seems to have an inexhaustible store of deviant ideas and fantasies to spring on Lana, and (in the early reels, at least) the oddest thing about her is that she accepts his perversions with nothing more than mild distaste, as if he just passed wind.  The panic that would possess most women if they found themselves trapped in an enclosed space with a madman is missing from her character.  In fact, from the beginning the newly chaste Lana encourages Jim’s mounting sexual frustration by suggesting that they sleep together in the spoon position, and teases him with tales of her promiscuity before she found Jesus, stopping abruptly just as his hopes start to rise.  There’s a powerful strain of misogyny in her portrayal as the ultimate faux-virgin tease, but oddly enough, it doesn’t come across as offensive; probably because the misandric disgust the movie directs at Jim more than counteracts it.  Lana intuitively realizes Jim is too needy to force himself on her—rape wouldn’t appeal to him, since what he longs for a willing approval of his kinks—so she has the upper hand in any sexual jousting.  But, as the days wear on, she also develops a genuine fondness for the only man around.  With no one else to interact with, in the redefined reality of their elevator prison, Jim’s perverse peculiarities lose their ability to shock and become a simple fact of her existence, like the buttons on the wall.

While Lana seems like a perfectly normal woman, or Jim’s imaginary version of a normal woman, she turns out to have a secret of her own.  Jim, with his permanently stained button down shirt and habit of picking his nose in public, begins the picture as one of those standoffish loners you wonder about as you see him shuffling around in public with his head downcast. He gradually reveals that his psychology is more twisted than your worst imaginings.  Lana’s slowly revealed affliction, on the other hand, is entirely physical, taking the form of a bizarre, Tetsuo-like sickness.  It’s almost as if forced exposure to Jim’s sick psychic radiation is mutating her.

Most of the film’s itchy bizarreness comes from the characters and their straight-faced acceptance of the impossible.  With no money for effects, Haradon wisely chose to tackle a project that was completely within his means.  The cardboard box set works in the movie’s favor, removing all distractions and highlighting the characters’ oversized psychologies, which play like grotesque shadows against the elevator’s blank walls.  Weirdness is suggested on the cheap, as when the cross around Lana’s neck inexplicably turns into an air freshener for one scene before reverting back.  Much of the imagery—mainly scatological, but also one scene of brutal animal cruelty—is shocking, but it always feels integral to the sickly atmosphere, never gratuitous.  Sometimes shots are framed poorly, but this seems deliberate, to add to the offness.  The sound is bad—some shots have a background hum that alternates back and forth with a silent scene, and the movement of Lana’s lips don’t always match what she’s saying.  The audio imperfections were probably unintentional, the result of a low budget and technical inexperience, but they could be viewed as happy accidents.  Unless you have a fetish for polish, none of the technical glitches—with the exception of the acting—diminish the effectiveness of the screenplay.

Haradon understands that the basis of drama is conflicting agendas, and, aside from a few missed opportunities to ratchet up the conflict up to stratospheric levels, the script manages to keep up our interest by slowly revealing new facets of the characters and keeping up the tension as Jim and Lana struggle to reconcile their need for intimacy with their utter incompatibility.  Those conflicting agendas are never revealed so dramatically as when the two agree to share their deepest wishes with each other, and scrawl them on pieces of paper for the other to read.  Though the screenplay never reaches the theatrical heights of its literary inspirations, “Waiting for Godot” and “No Exit,” as an x-rated first attempt at a Theater of the Absurd piece, it comes much closer to those luminaries than it probably had any right to.  The simple ending is very nearly perfect; chilling, but, due to the way the movie has altered our view of reality and forced us to reluctantly identify with Jim, also touching, in a bizarre way.  Despite the absurdity of the situation and the gargantuan eccentricities of the characters, if you’re willing to accept this movie’s rules at face value, you may find that it rings with a dangerous psychological truth, and hints at something unspeakably horrifying about male sexuality.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“As a champion of ‘Eraserhead’, ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’, ‘Naked Lunch’, and ‘Back Against the Wall’, all fine films that downright bask in their toxicity to the homogenized masses, I found Haradon’s film to be unique and fascinating and a most worthy addition to the midnight movie circuit. Just don’t ask me to spend any longer in Haradon’s mind than I have to in any one sitting. It’s very likely I’d never make it out!”–Daniel Wible, Film Threat (contemporaneous)

“…an inspired piece of weirdness and one of the more original debut films I’ve ever seen.”–Mike Everleth, BadLit.com

“…the weirdly simple, natural way Jim and Lana deal with their predicament, and relate to each other, provides more than enough sustenance to sate the adventurous movie-goer too long denied a good fix of the strange stuff…  Fans of early David Lynch and other low-budget, absurdist auteurs will be delighted by Elevator Movie, a sick and sincere slice of hopeless existentialism and despair.”–Kurt Dahlke, DVD Talk

OFFICIAL SITE: Elevator Movie Website

IMDB LINK: Elevator Movie (2004)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Zeb Haradon – interview with the director from artinterviews.com

DVD INFO: The weird movie community is lucky to have a flick as obscure as Elevator Movie (buy) available on a duplicated (and thus Netflix eligible) DVD at all; asking for special features would be too much.  The meager extras are trailers for eight other Patherfinder-distributed features (including List entry Gozu) and bios of writer/director/star Zeb Haradon and costar Robin Ballard.

“INDIEWIRE INTERVIEWER: Are there any themes or images you find too upsetting or disturbing to show?

MIIKE: Normal things.”

DIRECTED BY: Takashi Miike

FEATURING: Yûta Sone, Shô Aikawa, Kimika Yoshino

PLOT:  Minami is a journeyman yakuza whose boss Ozaki is going insane, and who has been ordered by higher-ups to see to it that he is killed.  Since Ozaki once saved his life, Minami is conflicted about the assignment; but fortunately, an accident seems to take care of the problem for him.  That is, until the presumptive corpse disappears while he is stopped in a strange town outside of Nagoya, and Minami launches a desperate search for his boss that leads him into a surreal labyrinth of malleable identities.

BACKGROUND:

• Gozu was one of five movies the prolific Miike made in 2003.
• “Gozu” means cow’s head, and the full Japanese title translates literally as Grand Theatre of Perversion and Fear: Cow’s Head (sometimes translated as Yakuza Horror Theater).
• Like many of Miike’s films, Gozu was originally intended as a direct-to-video release.  A successful Cannes screening got the movie noticed, and it was able to get wider theatrical distribution.
• Harumi Sone, who plays the small role of the Inkeepers Brother, is the father of star Yûta Sone, and the executive producer of the film.  He brought the idea of casting his son in a yakuza film to Miike, though it’s reasonable to suspect he had a more traditional film in mind.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In a film full of shocking imagery, the obscenely drooling cow-headed man who slowly approaches Minami to lick his face stands out.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Gozu may be the culmination of Miike’s “weird and perverted”

English language trailer for Gozu

phase, loaded with his particular fetishes and combining the two genres he works best in: horror and the yakuza (mobster) film.  With its Eraserhead-like aura of personal alienation and fearsome psycho-sexual nightmares, bizarre identity shifts, and a cow-headed man as a mascot, Gozu‘s weirdness is never in doubt.

COMMENTS:  Sexual repression always makes a good base for a weird movie.  Our libidos are socially maladjusted morons, and we constantly have to shush their inappropriate suggestions for novel avenues of gratification, whether they be with objects, beasts, dead people, or family members.  They bedevil us with passing fantasies we shouldn’t, and wouldn’t, want to be fulfilled in reality.  When they make seemingly reasonable demands—such as that we throw ourselves at that hunk or hottie with the twinkle in his or her eye—they can do the most damage of all, if the person they’re pushing you to mate with is all wrong for you.  You just can’t take the things to a well-heeled dinner party, unless you train them well to keep their big mouths shut.  So we muzzle our inappropriate sexual impulses and force them deep down into the subconscious, but we can only hope to contain them for a while.  In dreams and nightmares, these cellared desires bubble up through the floorboards of our conscious minds. 

When these fantastic, taboo images bubble up into Takashi Miike’s daydreams, he collects and bottles them and makes them into the stars of his latest cinematic horror show.

If sexual repression is an excellent base for a weird movie, then awkward yakuza foot soldier Minami is a perfect tent pole to drape a weird plot on.  He’s an adult virgin, and quite possibly a repressed homosexual.  As much as he wants to keep to himself and to remain a non-sexual being, he’s surrounded by characters who simultaneously tempt him to give in to his urges, and repulse him with their disturbing otherness.  The head of his criminal organization is an aging Lothario who requires a peculiar form of anal stimulation to perform.  In his wanderings through a nightmare suburb of Nagoya he encounters transvestite waiters and a horny, post-menopausal lactating innkeeper who can’t keep her hands or her milk to herself.  A man with a pigmentation disorder that makes him look like a half-painted kabuki actor tries to impose upon Minami to let him spend the night in his hotel room.  Beast-men in tighty-whities lick him in his dreams.  And when he finally meets a nice girl who’s into him… well, let’s just say he has justifiable reasons to be conflicted about the relationship…

Gozu begins with a standard sort of gangster dilemma: Minami has been ordered to dispose of immediate boss, a man who once saved his life and whom he considers a brother, but also a man who has become dangerous and unbalanced.  Though twisted, the plot follows yakuza film mechanics and tropes just enough to ground us. But it quickly becomes obvious that the real action and conflict is inside Minami’s head.  Only twenty minutes in, when he reaches a strange cafe on the outskirts of Nagoya where the chef wears a conspicuous black bra under his sheer white shirt and a local yammers insistently and continuously over the phone about how hot it was yesterday, it’s clear that Minami isn’t in reality anymore.  Ozaki’s (possibly dead) body disappears and the gangster must hunt for him throughout the bizarre burg. That digression becomes a pretense for a series of strange adventures where the mild-mannered mafiosi will be made maddeningly uncomfortable by the unwanted attentions of the suburb’s weird inhabitants, all who seem to be giving him the grand runaround while coming on to him.  Just as things events to be wandering off into a black plot hole, the world of the yakuza comes crashing back, and the story picks up steam again as it heads towards a bloody and perverse sexual nightmare climax where maestro Miike tops himself yet again—in fantastic imagery if not in pure shock value.

The chief (and perhaps the only serious) complaint about Gozu is that it bogs down in the middle section, during the search for Ozaki.  Miike is intent on impressing us with the Nagoya suburb’s surreal scenery, but like a bad tour guide he tires us out by being more interested in the sights than we are, and through giving us more information than we need.  The purpose of the tour is to imbue us with a sense of dread, of being out of place in an unknown land of strange and vaguely hostile customs, but Miike keeps plodding along after that goal has been successfully achieved.  Some events hang in the air.  There is an intriguing bit with an old sage who makes Minami answer a Sphinx-like riddle before agreeing to help him, threatening to take something important away from him if he answers incorrectly.  It seems like a perfect setup for a callback later in the script—what is the thing that’s important to Mianmi that’s might be in jeopardy?—but the character and the hint are dropped.  Yet other inscrutable incidents, such as the thin whitish fluid that drips from the inn’s ceiling into Minami’s soup, form uncanny connections later in the script.  Much of this meandering middle section seems off-the-cuff, almost improvised, and although Miike stumbles into some great set pieces, after seeing multiple scenes that don’t go anywhere, the anxiety welling up in our breasts starts to feel more about ourselves rather than Minami.  Will we ever find out what has happened to Ozaki, or has the script become unmoored?  Are we about to drift off into a sea of purposeless weirdness, wandering from one eccentric encounter to another until the movie arbitrarily ends?  Fortunately, a brilliant dream sequence jolts Minami and the script back on track, and like a roller coaster after a long climb, the story hurtles down into a dark tunnel at a breakneck pace.

Miike revisits many of the fetishes he explored two years earlier in Visitor Q, but here the sexual imagery is more nightmarish than fetishistic.  Lactation in a middle aged woman is again featured prominently, along with explicit and implicit incest.  A “vagina dentata” scene again plays a key role in the climax.  Gozu‘s perversions, while way beyond the pale, are less extended than those of Visitor Q.  Besides being shorter and less lurid, they are lit in darkness or a sickly yellow glow, rather than the garish sunlit video of the earlier film.  The change of emotional tone (from day to night) and genre (comedy to horror) makes Gozu less shocking, while at the same time feeling deeper, more affecting and more effectice.  The two films serve as a good example of how a change of context totally changes the impact of almost identical material; when Visitor Q asked me to laugh at incest and necrophilia, it left me with a dirty feeling.  Gozu, on the other hand, feels cathartic, like I’ve encountered something dirty within myself, but triumphed over it and cleansed it from my soul for a while.

Gozu is a decent into the knotty psycho-sexual thickets of the subconscious.  On the surface, it’s a tale of betrayal and loyalty among thieves.  Minaki’s guilt, and the searing conflict between doing his duty as a yakuza and the brotherhood he feels for Ozkai, is the text that slowly becomes the subtext.  The taboo and grotesque sexual imagery, delivered in an undeciphered code of symbols, rises to the forefront, and the gangster antics recede into the background.  The world of mob backstabbings comes to represent the world of the amoral libido, rather than the other way around.  In the movie’s deliberately inverted dream logic, the struggle between the our sane impulses and our demonic sex drives is more real and basic than the infighting between criminal factions.  The ending is ambiguously happy, just after a moment of incredible horror.  Gozu could be read as an allegory for repressed homosexuality, but the erotic cues are much broader than that.  Miike’s polymorphous perversity, his tales of incest in an inn where breast milk flows like wine, suggest that’s he’s after chasing something deeper and weirder; that he’s conjuring up all the repressed urges seething just below our civilized facades.  Give into them, and we may suffer the same fate as Minami.  Or, maybe it’s the act of repressing them that hurls him into a nightmare.  It’s a hard line to toe, but finding that balance between controlling and feeding our libidos is part of being human.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…arguably outweirds all previous efforts in the prolific Japanese director’s eclectic canon.”–Davide Rooney, Variety (contemporaneous)

“Anyone unfamiliar with Miike’s weird and twisted assaults on cinema might be best advised to think twice before submitting themselves to this insane-in-the-membrane outing. In fact, even hardcore Miike fans will probably be left in a tailspin by Gozu’s bizarre psychodrama.”–Jamie Russel, BBC (contemporaneous)

“‘Gozu’ may ramble for scene after bizarre scene with few real shocks along the way, but Miike draws us, together with his flummoxed hero, ever deeper into his creepy, sex-charged dreamscape, until he springs his climax like a razor-toothed trap.”–Mark Schilling, Japan Times (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK: Gokudô kyôfu dai-gekijô: Gozu (2003)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Anything But Banal; Takashi Miike on “Gozu” and His Ups and Downs – interview with the director from indiewire.com

Interview: Takashi Miike – from ign.com comes another Miike interview promoting the release of Gozu

Japanese Director Miike: An Acquired Taste – a National Public Radio audio segment profiling the career of Miike, inspired by the release of Gozu

Gozu at Movie-Censorship.com – [WARNING: graphic images] a listing of the differences between the US R-rated version and the uncut version.  Mainly of historical interest since the R-rated version is not on DVD.

DVD INFO: The single disc Pathfinder release was packed with extras, but is now out of print (search for used).  In its place (as of December 2009)  is a 2-disc “collector’s edition” courtesy of Cinema Epoch (buy), who is re-releasing Miike’s most popular titles in new editions.  Unfortunately, the 2-disc edition was not the version used in compiling this review, and Cinema Epoch has not (as yet) supplied information as to what’s included on the discs.  We will update this section when and if we find out what comprises the collectors edition, which is the only one now commercially available.

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

FEATURING: Issei Takahashi, Aoba Kawai

PLOT:  Alien parasites infect human hosts, morphing their bodies into bio-combat

machines who then fight each other to the death; shy factory worker Yôji and Sachiko, the lonely girl he fancies, soon find themselves caught up in the struggle.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Meatball Machine‘s alien gladiator-parasite setup is bizarre, but the movie never really tries to top its strangeness.  Rather, the weirdness pretty much stops at the premise, as the producers instead spend their energy indulging their true loves: gore and special effects.  The result is a movie that’s well within the weird genre, but not an outstanding example of it. (NOTE: upon further reflection, Meatball Machine was upgraded to “Borderline Weird” on 7/5/2010).

COMMENTS: To say that Meatball Machine‘s storyline is thin would be an insult to the relatively dense scripts of Michael Bay. In fact, the entire last half hour of the movie is nothing but an extended melee that persists long after the dual directors have run out of combat hooks.  To keep us emotionally involved in between (and during) the fight scenes, the plot takes a perfunctory stab at a touching love story between two losers; viewers will have to buy into this romance on their own, as neither the script nor the actors sell it.  But though Meatball Machine might be light on depth, what the movie does have going for it is unforgettable costume design and a few endearing oddnesses; and, of course, buckets of gore, for those who consider that a plus.  The alien parasites who populate this film thrive by inserting themselves inside humans and mutating the host body to create an ever-evolving arsenal of extremely implausible organic weapons, among which are biochainsaws, bioflamethrowers, and, for the necroborg who has everything, a visor complete with a windshield wiper to keep blood from splashing into his new issue, lead-soldered eyes.  The aliens also create bulky exoskeletons festooned with tubing and spikes, which make them look like members of a Japanese GWAR knockoff band.  (Due to budgetary restraints, all body modifications effect only the upper torso).  In their natural state, the aliens are pinkish blobs scuttling around in horseshoe crab shells and have the power to assault people with a whirring blur of tentacles far in excess of their body mass; once they set up shop inside a host, they clear out lungs, intestines and pancreases, and fuse with the remaining tissue to create a command bridge for themselves. They then control the host by pulling on a series of pink fleshy levers.  The effect of all this absurd body modification can be awfully weird, particularly in the first third of the movie, when we don’t fully understand what’s going on yet.

What I found unexpectedly strange, however, is that the movie takes the viewpoint of an adolescent male who is terrified of sex.  The hero, Yôji, is a factory worker who lives on his own, but the actor’s looks are so boyish that he appears to be a teenager among men.  He doesn’t fit in with his working class peers, the cool guys who spend their breaks discussing their sexual conquests and planning parties to which he’s not invited. Terminally insecure, he often hears the sound of laughter ringing in his ears after a failure, whether it’s coming from a prostitute or an alien parasite.  He’s awkward around women and can’t even bring himself to speak to Sachiko, the neighbor girl he fantasizes about and idolizes.  We’re not shocked to learn that he’s a virgin.  His experiences with sex are consistently humiliating or painful, and he can’t even penetrate the parasite shell he finds with his industrial drill press.  (By contrast, the parasites naturally use a wickedly phallic organ to hook into their host’s bodies).  When Yôji finally does get a willing girl alone in his apartment, the awkward seduction devolves into scarring horror, with a disquieting disrobing and a climax that ends in tentacle rape porn instead of tender, emotionally fulfilling lovemaking.  Since he never actually scores, he remains sexually pure, and he’s finally able to consummate his passion via a scenario he can presumably relate to: a manga-style battle royale.  In another movie, I might wonder if there was some deep psycho-sexual meaning to be found in all this fear-of-sex symbolism.  Here, I have the nagging suspicion hat the script is merely trying to empathize with the concerns and obsessions of the group it perceives as its core audience.

Meatball Machine should appeal to those attracted to over-the-top Japanese “splatterpunk” movies (Machine Girl, Tokyo Gore Police); it’s a solid example of the form.  But it’s not a movie to convert those who aren’t already immersed in this gory manga-influenced subculture; it doesn’t transcend or reinvent its specialized subgenre.

As a final note, the Danger After Dark DVD is lavish, including a 30 minute making of featurette and two short films, among other goodies.  The first short is the original Meatball Machine film that inspired the feature, but the second short, Meatball Machine: Rejects of Death (2007) is more interesting.  It’s a ten minute, highly politically incorrect music video-style production inspired by Meatball Machine‘s world and directed by Yoshihiro Nishimura, the special effects and makeup guru for the original movie.  I found it far more jaw-droppingly bizarre than the feature film, and at a brisk ten minutes, it didn’t wear out its welcome.  If your on the fence about getting this DVD, the extra features just might push you over the edge.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…probably the strangest thing about the film is the fact that its central romance rings true, and is oddly moving, even when the blood and severed limbs are quite literally hitting the screen… Of course, it’s the violence and bizarre transformations which are the film’s main selling point, and on this score, ‘Meatball Machine’ is an absolute must-see for all fans of wild exploitation and gore.”–James Mudge, BeyondHollywood.com (DVD)

This review was suggested by reader “Keith.”  Suggest a weird movie of your own here.

DIRECTED BY: Herk Harvey

FEATURING: Candace Hilligoss, Sidney Berger

PLOT:  Mary Henry, a church organist, is the lone survivor of an accident when the car she’s riding in plunges over the side of an old wooden bridge.  Looking to start over, she takes a job as an organist at a new church in a town where she knows no one.  She finds herself haunted by the sight of a pale grinning man who appears to her when she is alone, and fascinated by an old abandoned carnival pavilion visible from the window of her boarding house that she senses hold a mysterious significance.

BACKGROUND:

• Carnival of Souls was made in three weeks for less than $100,000 (figures on the budget vary, but some place it as low as $33,000).  The film was a flop on its initial release, but gained a cult following through late night television showings.  The film was restored and re-released in 1989 to overwhelmingly positive reviews.
• Director Herk Harvey, screenwriter John Clifford and composer Gene Moore worked together at Centron Corporation, an industrial film company, creating short safety documentaries such as Shake Hands with Danger and high-school propaganda/hygiene films such as What About Juvenile Delinquency? None were ever involved with a feature film again.
• Mesmerizing star Candace Hilligoss acted in only one other feature film, 1964′s The Curse of the Living Corpse, before retiring to raise a family.
• The movie has been very influential on other films, particularly low-budget horror films.  Director George Romero has said that the ghostly figures in Carnival of Souls inspired the look and feel of the zombies in The Night of the Living Dead (1968).  Other writers see a Carnival of Souls influence on films such as Eraserhead (in regards to its ability to evoke the nightmarish quality of everyday objects), Repulsion (disintegration of the mind of a sexually repressed woman), and even Apocalypse Now (the shot of Martin Sheen rising from the water mimics a similar scene involving The Man–thanks to Matthew Dessem of “The Criterion Collection” for the catch).
• Carnival of Souls was “remade” in 1998, although the plot (about a clown killer and rapist) shared nothing with the original except the name and the final twist.  Wes Craven produced.  The remake went direct to DVD and was savaged by critics and audiences alike.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  What else, but the titular carnival?  Ghostly figures waltz to an eerie, deranged organ score on what appears to be an old merry-go-round at the abandoned amusement park.  The tableau recurs twice in the film: once clearly in a dream, and once near the end as a scene that may also be a dream, but may be another state of being entirely.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Carnival of Souls is set in the ordinary, everyday

8 minute clip from Carnival of Souls (with annotations supplied by a youtube user)

world, but as seen through the eyes of an alienated, frightened woman.  The world the film depicts is familiar, but made maddeningly strange, and its the subtle, grubby touches rather than ghostly apparitions that allow this creepy low-budget wonder to seep deep under your skin.

COMMENTS: Carnival of Souls is a minor film miracle.  There was little reason to suspect that this crew—composed of a director, cinematographer and composer who had previously worked only on industrial shorts and hygiene films, a first-time scripter, a featured actress with no previous movie experience, with mostly local amateurs cast in supporting roles, all working with a micro-budget in a genre that made its living off of special effects—could create even a watchable film. In fact, they created a horror classic that has lasted through the years, while hundreds of bigger-budget films have deteriorated into dust.  Everything came together on the set of Carnival of Souls: fortuitous locations; a persistent, weird organ score by Gene Moore that alternates between angelic and demonic; an unforgettable performance by debuting Candace Hilligoss; evocative camera shots filled with moody shadows; technically flawed supporting performances that only add to the otherworldly atmosphere; minimalist makeup and effects that set the eerie mood, but are never so overdone as to become laughable.  Utterly unique, Carnival of Souls seemingly springs from nowhere, and leads (in Terrence Rafferty’s words) into “its own distinctive nowhere.”

After having been nearly lost, surviving only through rare TV screenings and bootlegs passed among fans, Carnival 0f Souls finally got the critical attention it deserved when it was re-released in 1989.  Reviews were almost universally positive, but often qualified their praise by mentioning the cheapness of the production and the amateurism of the acting, as if it’s low-budget genre origins were a muck it could never quite rise above.  Joe Brown of the Washington Post published one of the most condescending reviews, defending it only as “another case for the preservation of the black-and-white movie – in black and white, even this odd little $30,000 sleeper looks like Art now and again.”

Many audiences responded with the same sort of “surprisingly good, considering the budget” attitude.  I conclude the opposite: the amateurism is an essential part of Carnival of Souls unique charm, and had it been made with a huge special effects budget and performed by polished thespians with persnickety perfectionism, a far less compelling nightmare would have been birthed .

Part of an audience’s problem is that the opening scenes of the car crash that sends Mary Henry over the railing of a rickety bridge and into the Kansas river are the film’s weakest, least accomplished sequences.  The daytime establishing shots show little of the visual flair Harvey will deploy later in the film.  As the authorities dredge the river, their voices are badly dubbed in and terribly out of sync with their lip movements, and the voice acting is flat and uninspired.  At this point, the cheapness of the production isn’t yet contributing to the atmosphere.  It’s merely annoying, distractingly bad, giving an initial impression of incompetence that some viewers find impossible to shake.  For the first five minutes, Carnival of Souls gives no indication of being anything other than another forgettable poverty row B-movie fit only to fill out the bottom half of a drive-in double bill, until the first iconic image suddenly appears: a dazed, muddy Hilligoss unexpectedly staggering out of the river, the lone survivor.  From this point on, Carnival of Souls depresses the mood pedal and never looks back.

The most common obstacle viewers create to appreciating the greatness of the movie is an objection to the acting, which is sometimes described as being on a “community theater” level.  But the key to effective emoting isn’t bringing a one-size-fits-all naturalism to each role, but instead finding a fit between the particular characterization and the feel of the film.  Here, entirely by accident, the substandard acting makes Mary’s experience all the more terrifying, because it imbues her world with another layer of the strange and alien.  Imagine being trapped in a nightmare where you not only suffer horrifying visions, but in your moments of ”normalness” and respite everyone speaks to you in a slightly strained manner, as if they were reciting monologues they memorized fifteen minutes ago.  The cast’s performances have the same subliminal effect as the odd, off-key notes in Moore’s organ score—they sound “wrong,” but they are still undeniably lyrical.  The supporting characters’ struggle to express themselves realistically adds to the subtly off-key feeling of Carnival of Souls that everyone acknowledges is the key to the movie’s power.  In fact, the most experienced actress in the film—Frances Feist, the landlady, who had acted on Broadway and starred in at least four of Harvey’s previous shorts—makes the least impression, and I’m not entirely convinced that’s a coincidence.

Take, for example, the final scene in the Church.  While practicing on the pipe organ, Mary is suddenly possessed.  Her fingers begin to slide over the keys like tentacles, her naked feet caress the organ pedals sensually, and her face takes on a trancelike, half-ecstatic and half-terrified expression, as the melody she plays morphs from a reverent chorale into a dissonant carnival tune.  Visions from the haunted pavilion on the horizon dance before her eyes.  Suddenly, the minister breaks the tension as he storms in and stops her from playing, crying “Profane!  Sacrilege!”  He then fires her as organist on the spot, effectively casting her out of the church.  His reaction is unreal, absurd; an organist playing secular ditty is hardly a cause for dismissal, much less religious outrage.  Art Ellison’s melodramatic reading of these lines, with his overly careful enunciation and tones rising to an indignant pitch, as if preaching to unrepentant sinners from the pulpit, only heighten the extreme oddness of the passage, reinforcing the notion that even Mary’s “normal” reality is eerily weird.

Sidney Berger’s performance as Mary’s leering neighbor John is another technically flawed portrait that is actually pitch perfect when placed in its proper weird context.  Berger plays the part like he’s channeling a Bowery Boy as an alcoholic would-be ladies man.  Against our will, we sympathize with poor John, who’s definitely not good enough for Mary and hasn’t the faintest idea how to woo a lady with her class (his offer to spike her morning coffee with brandy is a colossal dating blunder).  At the same time, we recognize him as a threat, a peeping Tom and potential rapist.  Berger’s is a sleazy performance that flits between the cliched and the idiosyncratic, and it’s plausible to posit that a better actor might not have nailed the oily feel of badly forced pseudo-suavity that John exudes when trying to make time with the regal Mary.

It’s a good thing that Berger’s performance is so memorable, because his character plays an often under-appreciated role in Mary’s internal drama.  Mary is emotionally distant, frigid and antisocial.  John’s shabby joie de vivre, his offers of sex and liquor, are an invitation to her to enter back into human society, into a world beyond herself and her terrifying internal preoccupations.  John represents a life force, one that doesn’t quite resemble the good life, but which is nevertheless more tempting than the nightmarish half-life in which Mary is trapped.  That’s why she is so ambivalent towards John; she teases him, never quite stomps out his lustful hopes, and in the end, too late, tries desperately to cling to him.

Besides gripes about the budget, another slight that audiences and critics sometimes levy at Carnival of Souls is to compare it to a feature-length “Twilight Zone” episode (sometimes even going so far as to suggest–sacrilege!–that it would have been a stronger film at 30 minutes).  Not to diminish the achievements of that venerable TV series, but the comparison misleadingly suggests that Carnival of Souls is a movie that depends only on it’s twist ending.  Most people will see the twist coming far ahead of time.  The surprise adds a shock at the end if you haven’t guessed it, but even if you do, you don’t miss out on much.  The beginning and the end of the movie are formally necessary but almost irrelevant; Carnival of Souls is about getting swallowed up in the suffocating atmosphere in between.  It’s the antithesis of a movie like The Sixth Sense, which depends entirely on it’s never-saw-it-coming ending, and whose re-watchability evaporates once the viewer knows the ending.  Carnival of Souls benefits from repeat viewings, and seems to grow deeper, and perhaps even becomes bottomless, the more times you watch it.

Joe Brown might have done well to watch Carnival a few more times.  He dismissively writes that it  ”works well enough as chill-up-the-spine cinema, and one might even go further and argue that Mary’s anomie… suggests something more — an existential horror cheapie. But only if one were inclined to argue about such things.”  We may do well not to argue about Carnival of Souls, because the movie presents us with such a fragile reality that nailing it down to a simple allegory (say, of clinical depression) would endanger its frail beauty.  But to refuse to discuss Mary’s “anomie” or alienation is to abdicate the reviewer’s duty to cut to the core of the film; it’s to avoid the point while covering ones’ tracks with a thin varnish of snobbery.  The movie resonates because it speaks to a deep part of our brains below the rational, the part that is responsible for fugue states and jamais vu, for that frightening feeling of slippage we all experience where our surroundings seem suddenly and inexplicably strange and alien for a tick of the clock, where you wake up beside a longtime lover and for the briefest moment wonder who is that stranger? Carnival of Souls is a catharsis for that feeling, a feeling films rarely address.

Most critics and viewers see Carnival of Souls as an interesting but flawed oddity and give it a very respectable three out of four or four out of five stars.  They dock it a star for its technical failures, which they believe make it impossible to list it among the immortal films.  Fans of the weird will recognize it as a seminal five star classic, only enhanced by the parts to which the mainstream critics object.  If you have a set idea of “movieness” that involves a certain predictable look and feel, a gloss and realism, you’ll find Carnival of Souls doesn’t measure up to that standard.  But I submit that that missing star in the critics’ reviews doesn’t represent the film’s technical flaws; it represents precisely that quality that makes the movie weird.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a creditable can of film considering it was put together for less than $100,000… It isn’t enough story to prevail, but there is a fair share of suspense and some moments of good comedy.”–Variety (contemporaneous)

“Has the power to detatch you from your surroundings and put you in the middle of its own distinctive nowhere.”–Terrence Rafferty, The New Yorker

“…Harvey makes the familiar foreign and the mundane threatening, and in the sequences set at the already-bizarre Saltair—a gaudy fake castle on a desert lake—he achieves the first, and probably only, example of Great Plains Expressionism… a fine example of low-budget artistry, a creepy horror film, a bizarre and dreamlike death fable, and a true original, Carnival Of Souls thoroughly deserves its unexpected immortality.”–Keith Phipps, The A.V. Club (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Carnival of Souls (1962)

OTHER LINKS OF INTREST:

Internet Archive:  Details: Carnival of Souls: Watch or download a public domain copy of Carnival of Souls

Carnival of Souls (1962) – The Criterion Collection:  Contains a short essay on Carnival of Souls and remarks from screenwriter John Clifford, as well as full details on the contents of the Criterion Collection DVD.

Interview with Candace Hilligoss at THE ASTOUNDING B MONSTER:  A bitter Candace describes how her hopes to remake Carnival of Souls were sabotaged by Hollywood backstabbing

Great Saltair :: History: A history of the Saltair resort, the evocative locale where the creepiest scenes of Carnival of Souls were shot

Trailers from Hell: Mary Lambert on ‘Carnival of Souls’: Director Mary Lambert on the Carnival of Souls trailer

DVD INFO:  Because Carnival of Souls is in the public domain, there are several competing releases.

As usual, The Criterion Collection (buy) does the most thorough job.  Their two-disc release contains both the theatrical cut and the director’s cut with four to five minutes of additional footage, along with several documentaries and commentary by director Herk Harvey and screenwriter John Clifford.

Legend Films has put out a colorized version (fortunately, you can choose to view it in the original black and white as well) (buy) that also includes a mocking commentary track by comedian Mike Nelson of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”

The film is also available as part of the Mill Creek 50-pack “Horror Classics,” (buy) with no extras, of course.  Other notable titles in that collection are Metropolis, Nosferatu, White Zombie, and Night of the Living Dead.

DIRECTED BY: Roman Polanski

FEATURING: Catherine Deneuve

PLOT:  At first glance, manicurist Carole (Catherine Deneuve) seems merely to be painfully shy.  The early portions of the film follow her in her daily routine, and we grow to realize that her mental problems go much deeper: she daydreams, she seems to be barely on speaking terms with the outside world, she is dependent on her sister (who wants to have a life of her own) to care for her, and she is repulsed by men.  When her sister goes on a two week vacation, Carole’s fragile condition deteriorates, and we travel inside of her head and witness her terrifying paranoid delusions firsthand.

BACKGROUND:

• This was director Roman Polanski’s first English language movie, after achieving critical success with the Polish language thriller Nóż w wodzie [Knife in the Water] (1962).  The relatively recent success of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) undoubtedly helped the film’s marketability, as it could be billed as a female variation on the same theme.  But despite dealing with insanity and murder, Polanski’s film turned out nothing like Hitchcock’s classic; whereas Psycho was clearly entertainment first, with horrors meant to thrill like a roller-coaster, Repulsion was relentlessly tense, downbeat and disturbing, strictly arthouse fare.
• Ethereal Star Catherine Denueve (who had been the lover of, and given her first break in films by, roguish director Roger Vadim) was coming off her first major success in the lighthearted 1964 musical Les Parapluies de Cherbourg [The Umbrellas of Cherbourg].  Playing a dangerous, asexual, schizophrenic woman in a role that called for little dialogue immediately after her role as the romantic lead in a musical demonstrated her tremendous range and helped establish her as one of the greatest actresses of the late 1960s and 70s.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  There are many enduring images to choose from, including the hare carcass and simple close-ups of Deneuve’s eyeballs, but the iconic image is Carole walking down a narrow corridor, as gray hands reach out from inside the walls to grope at her virginal white nightgown. (The scene is a sinister variation on a similar image from Jean Cocteau’s surrealist classic Le Belle et La Bette [Beauty and the Beast] (1946)).

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Although there are several otherwordly, expressionistic dream

Original trailer for Repulsion

sequences in the film, Polanski creates a terribly tense and claustrophobic atmosphere even before the nightmares come with odd camera angles and the strategic use of silence broken by invasive ambient noises.  As Carole floats around her empty apartment, silent, alone, and ghostlike, ordinary objects and sounds take on an otherworldly quality.  The effect is unlike any other.

COMMENTS:  Polanski begins the film with a close-up of a woman’s eyeball, an opening that is reminiscent of the first shot fired in the Surrealist film revolution.  Later on, a straight razor features in the story prominently, strengthening this connection.  And, of course, the famous scene of the hands morphing out of the walls inevitably brings to mind the other iconic Surrealist film image: Cocteau’s candelabras.

But despite the nods to his influences, by nature Polanski isn’t a surrealist, but a Symbolist.  In Repulsion, Polanski weaves images masterfully, but although they may be obscure, they are never incongruous and irrational juxtapositions, like the Surrealists sought.  After opening credits play over the shot of the eye, the next image we see is a close-up of a woman’s cracking facial beauty mask.  Cracks recur throughout Repulsion, and obviously symbolize Carole’s deteriorating mind.  Early on, Carole looks at a developing fissure in the apartment wall and muses, “I must get this crack mended”; much later on, a crack in her bedroom wall breaks open and draws her into a particularly nasty nightmare.  Select symbols, both visual and auditory, reverberate throughout the film in a way that creates a subliminal narrative that, in an important way, is more important to the story than the minimalist plot.  Besides eyes, razors, and cracks, we also catch echoes of the sprouting potatoes and a hare’s corpse, along with the ticking clock, the dripping faucet, the street band with the spoon player (Polanski’s cameo appearance), the doorbell and phone (which sound exactly the same), the tolling bell and the laughter rising from the yard of the nunnery.  That the first shot of the narrative should be a crack appearing on a woman’s face telegraphs Polanski’s story about the crumbling of a woman’s personality.

The imagery and symbolism aren’t the only things that are masterful about Repulsion.  Critics have correctly noted Polanski’s use of sound, which expertly balances silence and atmospheric noise with judicious bursts from the alternately swinging and dissonant jazz score.  The superlative black and white cinematography and can’t be forgotten, either; there are times when a shot of three aging potatoes looks like a grayscale Max Ernst landscape.  The photography often has a way of transforming the ordinary into the strange and unfamiliar, a visual metaphor for the way Carole sees the world.

But the single most important element that makes the film a success is the magically glacial performance of Catherine Deneuve.  She is in the screen almost all the time, and says almost nothing.  In fact, except when she is terrified, she is frequently emotionless, staring off into space in her own dream world, totally blank faced and inscrutable.  And yet, watching her, it seems impossible to believe that other actress could have captured Carole’s insanity and made it seem plausible.  Deneuve must have known and observed a schizophrenic during her youth; she perfectly captures the subtle tics, the chewing on the lip, the spastic scratching (so unselfconscious and unfeminine), the swiping about her face as if swatting away invisible insects.

It doesn’t hurt that the face is classically beautiful, of course; casting an ugly actress in the role would have made the movie unbearably repulsive.  The tension between Deneuve’s exterior beauty and the grotesqueness of the world behind those eyeballs is the contrast that compels our interest.

In the beginning of the movie, we observe Carole entirely from the outside.  We are given no clue why she is detached.  We simply study her as a beautiful curiosity.  We see her the way her co-workers and her would-be beau does: she seems shy, distracted, perhaps even dull and flighty, but at the same time mysterious and vulnerable.  But when her sister leaves on vacation and Carole is left alone in the creaky, haunted apartment, our focus suddenly shifts from looking at Carole to seeing the world through her eyes.  Our first hint that we have entered a new world is when, along with her, we catch a glimpse of a man’s figure in the mirror–a man who couldn’t possibly be there (and in fact isn’t, when she turns to look).  Soon after, we are thrust into her (literal) dreams and nightmares.  And things grow increasingly worse from there, until we the viewers struggle to tell whether what is happening to her is real or imaginary.  We find ourselves traveling with her down that long dark corridor with the grasping hands.

There are a few things to criticize about the film, although none are serious enough to keep Repulsion from earning its five star rating.  Polanski lingers a bit too much over the setup.  Things don’t become really interesting until the sister leaves on vacation at about the 40 minute mark.  This is artistically justifiable, as the perfectly innocent items Polanski introduces in the early reels–the cracks in the wall, the rabbit, the dripping faucet, the foolishly misguided suitor–will recur with a sinister cast once Carole’s break comes.  But the slowness of the opening scenes will unfortunately keep many from actually experiencing the film.

Another frequent criticism is that, true to its name, Repulsion is relentlessly unpleasant.  It creates a tension that is never pleasantly relieved by the triumph over evil; Norman Bates is never defeated, Carole never escapes herself, the audience is never rewarded for allowing their nerves to be grated.  This is true; Repulsion isn’t entertaining.  But what it does, in taking us unflinchingly inside the unpleasant world of madness, it does better than any other movie.  Catharsis would have rung untrue in Repulsion, and blunted its impact.  If there had been a single artistic slip, the film would have sunk from being an unforgettable classic into being just an interesting but disturbing experiment.  We don’t want every film to be like Repulsion, but we can be glad that at least one exists.

The last criticism is my own, and it goes to the heart of the film.  The objection is there in the very title: Repulsion.  Too much is made of the idea that Carole’s illness is related to her fear of men, her sexual repression, and her possible history of childhood sexual abuse.  The audience is beat over the head with this idea, from Carole’s dreams of rape to her obsessive tooth-brushing after her suitor manages to steal a kiss to the fact that she only seems briefly normal when she interacts with either her sister or her lone friend, a female coworker, outside the presence of men.  Many interpret the final shot–a camera pan to a family photograph that lingers on the face and eyes of Carole as a young girl, sporting the same dead-eyed, distant stare as she does as a young woman–as a hint that it is childhood sexual abuse has caused Carole’s repulsion, leading eventually to obsession and madness.  The idea that Carole’s current repulsion towards reality stems from her “repulsion” to a past rapist seems offered as a sop to those who lust for a solution to the puzzle of her madness, as well as an excuse for Polanski to explore the dark side of human sexuality that has always fascinated him (sadly, in real life as well as in art).

Repulsion is, in fact, the most accurate depiction of schizophrenia ever put on film (there wasn’t really much competition in this field, until 1993′s Clean, Shaven).   This is true whether Polanski and Deneuve knew the name of the disease they were recreating or not. It is unfortunate that Polanski chose to suggest a psychosexual solution to the mystery of Carole’s mind, because the idea that sexual dysfunction was the root cause of every psychiatric disease known to man or woman–from frigidity to nymphomania, from fear of heights to schizophrenia–is a now-discredited relic of then-trendy Freudian psychology.  (Many psychiatrists now doubt that there is much link between schizophrenia and childhood sexual abuse).  Sex is central to human existence, but it doesn’t hold quite the monopoly on the unconscious that Freud, and certain 1960s movie directors, believed.

Carole’s repulsion towards men is more interesting as a symptom of her condition then it is as a cause.  Her disorder goes deeper than a mere fear of men.  When she literally barricades herself inside her apartment-inside her own crumbling mind-she is not merely hiding from an outside world where every construction worker on the corner is a potential rapist.  She is hiding away from humanity, from reality, from existence itself.  Schizophrenia–literally, “splitting (or ‘cracking’?) of the mind”–is terrifying because it is a pathology that arises spontaneously, mysteriously, without pat explanation.  Our desire to find a “cause” for it, to understand and master our own fears about our sanity, is a sign of our own mental infirmity.

Fortunately, it isn’t necessary to embrace this psychoanalytic interpretation of the film to praise it.  Polanski has left the root of Carole’s illness ambiguous enough to allow us freedom to ignore his Freudian blunders.  It is possible to see the final image of the dreamy waif merely as evidence that Carole has always been this way: that she was singled out by random lot to live out a brief life of torment.  In the end, the source of Carole’s irrational terrors isn’t crucial to the movie’s impact.  It’s the stark document of what happens in her during those seemingly endless nightmare days and nights, locked away from the world, that sticks with us, and makes us afraid.  The possibility that our own minds may betray us and drag us down to Hell is a far more frightening than any psycho-slasher in a hockey mask ever could be.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s clinical Grand Guignol, and the camera fondles the horrors… Undeniably skillful and effective, all right-excruciatingly tense and frightening. But is it entertaining? You have to be a hard-core horror-movie lover to enjoy this one.” -Pauline Kael (contemporaneous)

“…a game of movieness, a masquerade of Grand Guignol-as-psyche, virtually a parody of the surrealist’s notion of consciousness bagged and tagged on celluloid.” -Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice (DVD)

“Polanski’s triumph is a weird, tense depolarization of space, a chipping away at psychological walls so that fear and desire become synonymous…” -Ed Gonzalez, Slant (DVD)

IMDB ENTRY: Repulsion

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Trailers from Hell: Micheal Lehmann on ‘Repulsion’ – The director of Heathers and Meet the Applegates gives his thoughts on the Repulsion trailer

DVD INFO (UPDATED 8/1/09):  After years of shamefully subpar editions, Repulsion has finally been rescued by the ever-reliable Criterion Collection and given a 2-disc special release (buy). The set features a new director-approved transfer of the film, commentary by Polanski and Deneuve, two documentary features, trailers, and a booklet of essays. Also available on Blu-ray (buy).

The previous releases of the film are now obsolete, except for bargain hunters who want a single disc release. The original information on past releases is included below for those who still may be interested.

The Anchor Bay release (which appears to be out of print) is the superior version, and contains commentary by both Polanski and Deneuve as well as a featurette on the British horror film.  Barring a used copy of that release, the Latin American import version (which is in English, and plays on US and Canadain Region 1 DVD players) (buy) is the next best bet. Many have complained of poor picture quality (and an unforgiveable pan-and-scan aspect ratio) on the Entertainment Programs release (buy), but sadly it may often be the best and cheapest version available.