FEATURING: Peter Scanavino, Jason Robards III, Ana Asensio, David Thornton

PLOT:  In the year 2044 people have been genetically engineered to feel perpetually happy, so

they perversely seek out illegal drugs that bring intense pain; in this society, a dealer in pharmaceutical misery stumbles upon what may be a generations old conspiracy that goes by the code name “Zenith.”

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  More confusing than weird, Zenith is at the same time a laudable and thought-provoking, but forced and undramatic, attempt to create a cult-y reality-bender along the lines of more organic puzzle movies like Primer.

COMMENTS:  Zenith is one bewildering conspiracy movie.  It creates frustration and paranoia by chopping up its narrative with lots of fast-forwards, rewinds, out-of-sequence scenes, and even episodes of déjà vu.  Elisions, false clues and dead end leads increase the confusion quotient.  Although the sloppiness of the story is an intentional strategy meant to put us inside the paranoid heads of the protagonists, the procedure still occasionally comes off as the director jerking the viewer around—especially when it comes to the rug-pulling conclusion, which tempts alienating the movie’s core audience.  Writer/director Vladan Nikolic crafts an intricate scenario here that may please fans of “difficult” stories, but it’s more rewarding, above and beyond the plot level, to think of the movie as an examination of the conspiracy fan’s psychology.  “Dumb” Jack, the pain-pill pusher (a grungy and intense Peter Scanavino), begins the story thinking of his defrocked priest father, Ed, who’s obsessed with trivia about the Illuminati and the Bilderbreg group, as a crazy old coot.  But the more he watches old VHS tapes of dad’s decades-old investigations of the “Zenith” conspiracy, the more he comes to be just like him, until at the end the two men have become virtual doppelgängers.  The movie suggests that it may be able to easier to get sucked into irrational conspiratorial beliefs than it seems, especially seeing as how it asks the viewer to take pleasure in following the clues and tagging along as they track down that mysterious man who, if only he can only be located and cornered, will Explain what it’s All About.  Any good conspiracy thriller needs a red herring, and this turns out to be one of Zenith‘s downfalls—because the major red herring here is the science fiction setting, and it turns out to be more interesting than the main storyline.  The movie creates the intriguing prospect of a society in which everyone has been genetically engineered to be eternally happy.  Paradoxically, this perpetual pleasantness creates a black market in the items Dumb Jack specializes in—”heavy duty tranquilizers with massive side effects, expired thirty years ago”—so thrill seekers can feel something painful, novel and intense.  The idea is a classic science fiction conceit: what happens when technology purports to change the basic nature of human beings?  If people are happy all the time, will they get inevitably grow jaded?  Everything in the utopian/dystopian world of 2044, except the nightclubs, looks run down—peeling paint, missing windowpanes, light poles lying on the ground.  Is the suggestion that, with gratification built into the genome, the ambition to keep the world clean and orderly has disappeared?  These are fascinating speculative questions that cut to the core of the human experience, and Zenith could have easily filled up ninety minutes exploring the philosophical and satirical ramifications of a society built on a foundation of unearned satisfaction. There seem to be two movies cooking in the same cinematic oven here, and although the thriller conspiracy comes out reasonably well done, the dystopian parable winds up only half-baked.  Still, though there’s some frustration, and the movie never really settles into a groove, the ideas alone make it worth seeing.  The twist ending, taken literally, is shopworn; but after some consideration, you may conclude that Nikolic has overlaid a clever meta-twist on the tired cliché.  There’s a false ambiguity to the conclusion, and the temptation to pick the less compelling of the competing versions of events may be related to the overriding theme of the movie.

Zenith is relying on a bit of marketing gimmickry in hopes of building an audience.  The movie starts off with blatantly fake disclaimers stating that the movie contains “illegal material” and proclaiming that filmmakers will not be held responsible for damages resulting from the viewing of the film.  It also professes to be directed by “Anonymous” (Nikolic is quietly billed in the end credits as “experiment supervisor”).  Furthermore, Zenith is a transmedia experience: if you go to the movie’s website and follow the “Stop Zenith” link, you’ll be taken to a website (which links to other fake websites, including Dumb Jack’s time-traveling blog) that claims to provide more information on the film’s conspiracy.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“During the strange third act, derangement seems to spread from one character to the next like a plague, infecting not only the players but also the film itself… the indescribably odd ending only sends the viewer off more confused.”–Glenn Heath Jr., Slant Magazine (contemporaneous)

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

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

abusing medical students.

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

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

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

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

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

FEATURING: Ruth Roman, Anjanette Comer, Marianna Hill, Suzanne Zenor, David Mooney [as David Manzy]

PLOT: A social worker becomes obsessed with a case involving a family with an adult son

with the intellect of a one-year old, who sleeps in a crib and wears a diaper.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Baby‘s infantilism premise, which is handled with an almost disconcerting matter-of-factness, is outlandish, but the film is fairly conventional in its execution.

COMMENTS: Although it has a minor cult following, for the most part The Baby is a fairly ordinary thriller with low production values.  Director Post had previously worked extensively in television, and his direction here shows it: it’s efficient, competent, but unexciting.  But the colorful material overcomes the pedestrian direction, and you can see why this one stuck in people’s memory: the film “stars” an actor in his twenties who sucks his thumb and sleeps in a crib, and no one in the movie seems to think this is the slightest bit odd.  His teenage babysitter even changes his adult-sized diapers without a second thought.  That The Baby is also filled with hints (and often more) of psychosexual perversity—infantilism, sadism, pathological possessiveness—doesn’t hurt its memorability quotient a bit.  And despite the movie’s made for TV feel, there are a couple of things that it does very well.  The acting is uneven, but Ruth Roman brings verve to her role as the bitter old matron who’s willing to do anything to keep her Baby.  She channels Joan Crawford’s looks, Suzanne Pleshette’s voice, and Shelly Winters’ orneriness; by the end, she’s become a Ma Barker-style family queenpin, masterminding plots and directing her two oversexed girls on kidnapping and rescue missions.  (Perhaps coincidentally, and perhaps not, the family’s “two sexually predatory sisters and a nonverbal idiot brother” sibling structure replicates the even weirder clan from Jack Hill’s Spider Baby [1968]). Roman provides so much bitchy fun that you wish she’d thrown all restraint out the window and gone into full bore Mommie Dearest histrionics (if she had, the film really would be the undisputed camp classic it claims to be).  The downside of Roman’s charisma is that she sets off the soap opera-level talents of the pretty but vapid actresses hired to play against her.  Speaking of bad acting, though, nothing beats David Manzy’s head-lolling, mouth-breathing performance as Baby.  His attempts at infantile mewling and babbling are embarrassing.  Maybe that’s why (some viewers report) in earlier television screenings of the film, Manzy’s voice was overdubbed with the cries of a real baby!  It’s hard to say Manzy’s performance is bad—we don’t really have any other adult infant characters like Baby to compare it against, and maybe this is exactly how a twenty-year old with the brain of a one-year old would act—but it is ridiculous-looking.  Besides Roman’s performance, the other thing that stands out about The Baby is the twist ending.  For most of its running time, the movie does the minimum necessary to keep you interested.  There will be long sequences of the social worker visiting Baby, lightly fencing with Roman and her daughters over the best interests of the child, and just when you start checking your watch and wondering whether this is all the movie’s got, bam—Baby will do something wrong and need to be punished, providing another kinky plot development that gives the film life again for a few more minutes.  The twist ending operates in the same way, coming after the movie has taken an unexpected but unsuspenseful detour into slasher movie territory for the climax, with characters being picked off one by one in a too-dark house.  Then, just as you’re about to yawn and put The Baby to bed, there’s a pleasantly perverse little jolt at the end that wakes you up and makes you look at the film with new eyes.

Severin Films re-released The Baby in 2011 in a widescreen version remastered from the original negative.  The movie had previously been available on DVD in a couple of inferior incarnations, one from Image Entertainment and in a no-frills full screen version from the now-defunct Geneon, a company specializing in anime.  Severin’s release  adds only a few extras—the original trailer and telephone interviews with director Post and “star” Mooney—but it’s the best presentation the film’s fans are likely to see for an almost 40-year old camp thriller.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strangely interesting little curio. If you’re in the mood for something unabashedly off-the-wall, then it should be worth your while to check it out.”–porfle, HK and Cult Film News (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by our own Eric Gabbard,who called it “weird but well constructed.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Dario Argento

FEATURING: David Hemmings, Daria Nicolodi

PLOT: A pianist witnesses the brutal murder of a psychic and becomes obsessed with

tracking down the killer, even though everyone he associates with is being slaughtered.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Not quite weird enough.  Deep Red flirts with the irrational, but at this stage of his career director Argento hadn’t fully committed to the bizarre yet.

COMMENTS: Previous to Deep Red, Dario Argento had made three stylish, well-regarded gialli (for those unfamiliar with the Italian giallo genre, imagine a slasher movie with an actual whodunnit plot and a near-Gothic atmosphere, and add bad dubbing).  With Deep Red, the director turned up the style meter several notches, and pushed further into his own esoteric brand of the fantastique: the Expressionist flowers that bloom in Suspiria grow from the blood spilled in Deep Red.  Still pitched as a traditional mystery, Deep Red does not abandon the primacy of plot, but the story becomes so convoluted, and makes so many concessions to atmosphere, that it begins to bear hallmarks of weirdness.  The film begins with a shadow-play prologue that reenacts a Yuletide murder, then segues into a parapsychology conference held inside a scarlet-cloaked opera house.  A panel of experts discuss telepathy in zebras (!) and then introduce a psychic, who senses the presence of an evil soul in the audience.  During her subsequent brutal murder, a pianist played David Hemmings witnesses the murderer leaving the scene of the crime and becomes obsessed with tracking down the killer (who strikes again several times).  Although the tale is intricately constructed and the resolution itself “makes sense,” the movie takes fairly arbitrary steps in its quest for closure.  Drive-in film critic Joe Bob Briggs used to have a saying, “this movie has so much plot it’s like it doesn’t have any plot at all,” an adage that fits Deep Red perfectly.  The story takes leaps that aren’t always clear to the viewer.  Barely introduced to each other at the scene of the crime, Hemmings and a female photographer (Nicolodi) suddenly begin working as a team to investigate the murder.  Hemmings is constantly following up on obscure clues, but they always lead to scary set pieces, rather than pieces of the puzzle.  A line from the psychic sends him off searching for a haunted house so he can eventually discover horrifying murals; they seek a woman, who’s importance is stated but never explained, who is killed off in one of Argento’s tensest and most sadistic kill sequences before she can divulge whatever it was she knew.  The murderer’s methodology is ludicrously elaborate: we’re supposed to accept that he creates a scary looking ventriloquist’s puppet, sneaks into someone’s house, sets the dummy up on some sort of hidden rail system, and uses it to distract his victim so he can go in for the kill.  In other scenes, pet birds improbably impale themselves on knitting needles. With all of this exaggerated atmosphere, it’s no wonder an admiring Guillermo del Toro declared that Deep Red “doesn’t make logical sense, but makes lyrical sense.“  Fetishistic closeups of dolls, gloves, a mascara-laden eye, phonograph needles, and so on are sprinkled throughout the action.  The framing and set design are excellent, the camerawork is fluid and impressive, and the revolutionary score(John Carpenter acknowledges the obvious when he admits that his famous theme for Halloween was inspired by Deep Red‘s arpeggios) by operatic jazz-rock outfit Goblin creates a novel brand of anxiety.  The acting, as is usual with this director, aren’t up to the high standards of the rest of the film, but everything else is so assured that the sometimes awkwardly dubbed and delivered dialogue almost becomes just another element of style.  The suspense scenes are among Argento’s best and the deaths among his most painfully gruesome.  But it’s the uneasy balance created by the movie’s deep evocation of the irrational, hidden inside a detective story—the most ultra-rational of all literary forms—that ultimately buries Deep Red in the viewer’s subconscious mind.

There’s a friendly rivalry between fans and critics who champion Deep Red as Argento’s best film, and those who hold out for the weirder Suspiria. It all depends on what point you believe irrationality should crest to make for the perfect psychological horror; some feel Suspiria goes too far, while others (like us) contend that Red is just a warm-up for the masterpiece to come.

Blue Underground advertises it’s 2011 DVD re-release of Deep Red as “presented here in the Uncensored English Version for the first time,” but at 105 minutes it runs about the same as previous versions; only a little bit of gore is restored.  The original Italian version ran 126 minutes; 22 minutes were cut for the American release, and they were never dubbed (so that the complete English version of the film contains a mix of subtitles and dubbing).  Blue Underground’s Blu-ray release (buy) contains both versions.  Extras on both releases include two trailers; ten minutes of previously-seen interviews with Argento, co-writer Bernardino Zapponi and Goblin; a somewhat strange music video of the theme song by the band Daemonia (members of the group are killed in the same ways as the characters in the film—as they’re playing the song); and a new music video by a reunited Goblin.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“When Deep Red is good… its great: Argento does some staggering things with the camera, including hyper-real closeups of bizarre knick-knacks in the killers lair.”–Neil Young, Neil Young’s Film Lounge (DVD)

Also released as Psycho Boy and His Killer Dog, and on video as Mad Don (to cash in on the unexpected celebrity of Don Johnson and the success of Mad Max)

DIRECTED BY: L.Q. Jones

FEATURING: Don Johnson, Tim McIntire (voice), Susanne Benton, Jason Robards

PLOT: Vic roams the post-apocalyptic desert wasteland with his telepathic dog Blood, who has the ability to sense the presence of human females.  Blood finds a woman for Vic in an underground bunker; as Vic is about to rape her, a band of marauders come upon them, and Vic and Blood fight them off.  The woman gives herself to Vic willingly but later sneaks away; Vic follows her to her strange underground world, leaving the badly wounded Blood behind on the surface.

BACKGROUND:

• A Boy and His Dog was adapted from Harlan Ellison’s novella of the same name.  Ellison began the screenplay but ran into writer’s block, and director Jones and producer Alvy Moore completed the script.
• Jones wrote the film’s infamous last line.  Ellison has gone on record as “despising” the final dialogue.
• Director L.Q. Jones was better known as a character actor (usually a heavy) in westerns, appearing in small roles in five films by Sam Peckinpah among his 150+ acting credits.  This is one of only two feature films he directed.  He appears as a cowboy in the film-inside-the-film.
• Blood, the dog in the film, was played by Tiger, who also portrayed (in one episode) the family pet in the “Brady Bunch” television show.
• Ellison continued the adventures of the post-apocalyptic pair in the (now out-of-print) graphic novel Vic and Blood: The Continuing Adventures of a Boy and His Dog .

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The setting and ideas of A Boy and His Dog are more memorable than the imagery, but the clown-faced residents of underground Topeka worm themselves into the memory.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A Boy and His Dog gives us two weird worlds for the price of one: a

Original trailer for A Boy and His Dog

scorched earth surface roamed by sarcastic, hyper-intelligent telepathic dogs, and an underground society of impotent totalitarian mimes.  Either vision on its own might have been weird enough to get this movie onto the List, but put them together and you’ve got something radically unique.

COMMENTS: A Boy and His Dog may be the weirdest “buddy” movie ever made, thanks to the fact that one of the pals is a telepathic mutt who uses his psychic abilities to find rape victims for Don Johnson.  The relationship between the dog, Blood, and the boy, Vic, is the heart of the movie: they often bicker like an old married couple, but the loyalty they show each other is the only worthwhile thing that survived the Bomb.  Reversing expectations, it’s Blood the beast who’s the brains of the partnership, and the human who’s all animal instinct.  It’s Blood tries to teach the reluctant Vic post-apocalyptic history (incidentally letting the audience in on the film’s backstory), and it’s Blood who dreams of finding a better life (a paradise where people have rediscovered agriculture, located “over the hill.”)  Vic, who seems to be about 18 years old, is girl-crazy and is only interested meeting women in a world where females are scarcer than at a World of Warcraft convention in Juneau, Alaska.   Vic is a habitual rapist, and Blood his psychic pimp who finds him victims in exchange for food; and yet, somehow, their relationship is sweet, in a blackly comic way.  A young Don Johnson is surprisingly good as the rash redneck who fearlessly charges into a band of roving thugs to steal a few cans of food, and his performance is especially noteworthy considering he acts opposite an animal, often reacting to lines of dialogue that will be dubbed in later.  But Tim McIntire is perfect as Blood; he creates the character so completely that it’s impossible to imagine another actor in the role.  Blood has an acerbic sense of humor—when Vic gets sexually frustrated, he spontaneously invents a dirty limerick to taunt the boy—and McIntire’s delivers his putdowns (many of which go over Vic’s head) with perfect irony.  When he suddenly switches gears and turns sincere and vulnerable, though, the effect can be heartbreaking.  The beautifully written repartee and constant needling between the two compadres suggests a lifetime of shared experiences.  Blood and Vic are brains and brawn, complementary to the point of being almost co-dependent, and should be inseparable chums on their scavenging journeys.  Throw a beautiful woman—the traditional solvent that dissolves the bond between two men—into this balanced equation, though, and things get dramatic.

It’s a good thing that the chemistry between Johnson and McIntire is so good, because it immediately sells the outlandish premise.  The emotionally complex interactions between Vic and Blood are so realistic that we soon forget we’re starting to sympathize with a talking dog.  We hardly even wonder how man’s best friend came to be his master’s intellectually superior psychic wingman and mentor.  The script never bothers to explain it to us, but asks us to take this crazy universe as it is (Ellison’s novella adds more details, but I like the way the movie simply ignores the suspension of disbelief problem and asks us to accept its world on faith).

The post-apocalyptic mise en scène—punk gangs scurrying about a desert wasteland fighting over scarce resources, whether they be water or women—is familiar to us now, but A Boy and His Dog is the godfather of the genre.  George Miller would adapt this same basic setting (including the amoral tone) four years later in his hit Mad Max, then sanitize the setting in his mega-hit The Road Warrior.  Hordes of imitators would follow throughout the 1980s before the cycle largely burnt itself out, but, in 1975, this anarchic post-nuke scavenger society was a strange scene indeed, even minus the chatty canine.

Jones and Ellison imbue their world with mildly surreal touches that their imitators never got hip to (or wisely abandoned).  There’s an outpost of civilization in the wilderness, but it’s an odd one; essentially, it’s a truck stop built around a drive-in movie.  Sure, you can get a shower there, and a date with what must be the world’s busiest prostitute, but cinema alfresco is the main attraction.  (It’s an appropriate touch considering A Boy and His Dog probably played at a lot of drive-ins in the  mid-Seventies).  Of course, the proprietors can’t just screen any old movies to the horny desert rats who trade their hard-earned cans of peaches and tins of sardines for tickets to the show.  The star attractions are a series a scratchy old worn-out black and white smokers and burlesque reels that appear to date back to the 1950s and 1960s (the film is set in 2024).  As Vic and Blood go about their business, advancing the plot, we get occasional peeks at the action onscreen.  The seamy, scrambled feature we can recreate from our glimpses of the action is a strange one: we see a woman stripping, couples making love, cowboys, lynch mobs, a man on fire, coitus interruptus at gunpoint.  The print has faded to a golden sepia, vertical streaks obscure the action, and sometimes a frame of film is upside down.   When our focus returns to Vic and Blood arguing over a popcorn purchase and stumbling onto a major plot point, diegetic screams of pain or moans of pleasure fill the air.  These jumbled antique porno snippets create a weird background hum of social decay, and make what could have been a throwaway scene into something unforgettable.

If a land of psychic dogs hunting women across an irradiated landscape seems strange to you, brace yourself for when Vic abandons Blood to chase a pretty little derriere down a rabbit hole and into the far more bizarre Wonderland of Topeka.  Civilization, of a satirical sort, has survived the holocaust underground, where what appear to be a band of Lutheran farmers have recreated Norman Rockwell’s America in an eternal twilight.  The men dress in bow ties or overalls, the women in prairie dresses, and both sexes smother their faces in white greasepaint and highlight their cheekbones with obscene amounts of blush.  Topeka seems to be throwing a perpetual pot luck picnic at a park planted with fake shrubbery, complete with clown marching bands and barbershop quartets.  In between meals you can step inside the church, sit in the pews, and watch the governing Council do its business: handing out blue ribbons for the best canned goods, and sentencing wrongdoers to “the farm” for the generic crime of “lack of respect, wrong attitude, and failure to obey authority,” all with a strict adherence to Robert’s Rules of Order.  A loudspeaker constantly blares through the streets of Topeka, giving the citizens news, “sound tours” into the past (the growls and trumpets of lions and elephants), history lessons, prayers, “helpful hints for living,” and instructions for making the perfect country breakfast.  The propagandistic PA echoes the seedy drive-in sound system that, earlier in the film, piped in the sounds of sex and fighting; this time the background noise is a barrage of ironically incongruent, wholesome nonsense.

After being forcibly bathed, Vic decides he wants out of the two-bit town, until the Council makes him an offer that sounds (and is) too good to be true.  Thankfully, morally upright Topeka has a teenage rebellion problem of its own, and Vic is able to escape their dastardly plans and make it back topside, with his female prize in tow.  Once there, he meets up with Blood again, and realizes he never should have deserted his dear friend to chase some skirt.  Vic has to find a way to make up to his best friend for his betrayal.  The solution he comes up with leads to the film’s infamous, ironically perfect ending and its killer final line.

Many people find the film’s ending to be in bad taste.  Many find the entire movie to be in bad taste, in fact, and they have a point.  A Boy and His Dog has frequently been accused of going beyond just being a “guy movie” and transgressing into the realm of outright misogyny.  And while I’m not sure that the movie goes that far—I think the film is more pro-womanizer than it is anti-woman—I confess that the sub-misogynistic subtext, while not ruining the film, does detract from my enjoyment of it, and makes A Boy and His Dog  difficult to unconditionally endorse.

Viewed one way, A Boy and His Dog is about the hero recognizing and affirming a real, enduring friendship above a passing erotic fancy.  That’s a fine message, but the overall context of the film begs a different reading.  What we actually see in A Boy and His Dog is 1) a guy who’s enjoying life hanging out with his male buddy, occasionally using women to satisfy his sexual urges, who 2) falls emotionally for a woman and abandons his friend and 3) is tricked into a hellish version of wholesome family life; 4) the woman turns out to be a conniving deceiver who was just using him, so he 5) viciously kicks her to the curb to reunite with his true friend.  The women in A Boy and His Dog are commodities (the movie’s most disturbing quote is not the final punchline, but Vic’s spontaneous reaction when he finds a bloody, still-breathing rape victim: “Hell, they didn’t have to cut her!  She could have been used two or three more times”).  The only meaningful relationship in the film is between guys; the only woman we meet pretends to be a victim, but is really a trickster and deceiver out to trap the hero.  The horrifying world she comes from is civilized and family oriented, but it’s also feminized—even the men wear makeup.  The horrifying event Vic must escape from is, significantly, matrimony: a nightmarishly twisted wedding ceremony.  And how can Vic redeem himself for succumbing to his need for love?  Only by rejecting the civilized world and returning to his former lifestyle of treating women as disposable chattel.

By the time Ellison wrote the original novella, he had already been married three times, with the longest lasting four years and the shortest seven weeks.  He characterized his first marriage as “four years of hell” and had written an anthology of cynical “romance” stories entitled “Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled.”  Given his troubled relationships with women, it may not be shocking that he would pen a scenario that portrays the world of rootless, feral males as more desirable than the prison of civilization with its castrating institution of forced monogamy.  It’s true that A Boy and His Dog is “just a story,” that Vic’s attitudes towards women are absolutely in tune with the setting and true to the way men would think and act if faced with a catastrophic shortage of women.  It’s arguable that Quinella June is a unique character and shouldn’t be viewed as the representative for her sex.  You could defend the position that the movie’s misanthropic rather than specifically misogynist: the men aren’t exactly portrayed as good people, either.  You could view the intellectual, asexual Blood, who proclaims that “breeding is an ugly thing” and whose main interest in copulation is in tracing the word’s Latin roots, as a symbol of the mind in opposition to Vic’s libido, which puts a much different and more favorable spin on the symbolism. Still, there’s something extremely disquieting about the film’s resolution, which manipulates us into cheering when Vic finds redemption by rejecting erotic love (shown to be a cruel illusion) and resuming his career as a rapist.  It’s a surrealistic version of the male gangsta ethos that’s summed up in the phrase “bros before hos”; call it “pooches before cooches.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a weird, offbeat sci-fi movie… It’s got a unique . . . well, I was about to say charm, but the movie’s last scene doesn’t quite let me get away with that. “–Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“The good ideas are marred by awkwardness; the terrible ideas are redeemed somewhat by being, at least, unpredictable… The underworld part, brilliantly grotesque as it partly is, breaks the realistic vision of the beginning. The two parts don’t really work together…”–Richard Eder, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Some scenes towards the end are simply bizarre. However, if you’re a serious SF buff, then you’ll probably look past the film’s weaknesses and ‘get’ what made the movie the definite cult classic it is.”–James O’Ehley, The Sci-Fi Movie Page (DVD)

IMDB LINK: A Boy and His Dog (1975)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Apocalypse Wow! – The Montreal Mirror‘s Matthew Hays interviews L.Q. Jones 28 years after A Boy and His Dog‘s release

“A Boy and His Dog” in “Harlan Ellison: the edge of forever” – Via GoogleBooks comes this chapter about the original novella, discussing the differences between the story and film versions and the misogyny controversy, from a critical work on Ellison by Ellen Weil and Gary K. Wolfe

A Boy and His Dog: The Final Solution – In a contemporaneous essay, feminist Joanna Russ claims “sending a woman to see A BOY AND HIS DOG is like sending a Jew to a movie that glorifies Dachau”

A Boy and His Dog at TV Tropes – Listing for the film at the sometimes perceptive, sometimes hilarious cliché-cataloging site

DVD INFO: A Boy and His Dog has yet to receive the DVD treatment it deserves.  The 2003 First Run Features “Special Edition” release (buy) presents the feature in widescreen, but the print is grainy and un-restored.  There is a lively commentary by L.Q. Jones, cinematographer John Morrill and film critic Charles Champlin, and two trailers for the film.  The box cover advertises liner notes from science fiction author Robert Heinlein, but all reports indicate that these notes were never actually included with the package.

(This movie was nominated for review by “Kathryn,” who characterized it as “not great, but definitely some weird ideas floating around there.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Tom Cavanagh, Kathleen York, Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs

PLOT: The day after his 40th birthday, George Grieves enters Mt. Abaddon Hospital for a

routine colonoscopy.  Waking after the procedure it rapidly becomes apparent that something has gone seriously wrong.  George and his only ally, a nurse called Zoe, attempt to discover the truth in an increasingly nightmarish hospital of horrors.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It really isn’t weird enough.  Certainly there are periods of scary oddness, but none that haven’t been depicted before in other, better films.  I hesitate to call the plot twist a “twist” as any regular weird film fan will see it coming over the hill a mile away, waving its hands to attract your attention (Zoe the stripper-gram nurse, I’m looking at you love!)  It has some serious and troubling points to make about fear, prejudice, white middle class guilt and health care systems in general, but it makes them in a long-winded, repetitive way.

COMMENTS: I practically leapt at the chance to review this film, having heard nothing about it, and being fond of “weird hospital” movies. About half way in I began to regret my decision, and this was the first film that I nearly pulled out of reviewing.  This is not because it’s a bad movie—though it is long-winded and really could have used the editor’s hand clipping away twenty minutes or so—but because the uncomfortable issues the movie raises hit close to home.

I’ve grown up in the occasionally stony but generally reliable bosom of the British National Health Service and felt I should perhaps have watched this with my wife who, as an American, has now experienced heath care on both sides of the Atlantic.  Procedures occurred in Sublime which seemed odd to me, even taking into account the national differences.  I mean, that was an awful lot of laxative!  Are American colons so different?

Protagonist George is an upper middle class, able-bodied (at least initially), straight, white male and his attitudes, prejudices and fears were in many respects different from mine.  But even if the specifics are different, fear, prejudice and guilt are common to everyone.  When push comes to shove the big fears gnaw at us all and courage isn’t being without fear, but facing up to it.

We are currently dealing with the terminal illness of a family member and therefore we’ve been talking about end of life fears and regrets to an unusual degree, and this film touched on a number of issues that are a part of our daily lives right now.  Perhaps I’m inclined to cut it some slack because of this.  After much reflection, though, I’ve come to the conclusion that Sublime is a flawed film which asks some important questions. It’s a film I think would benefit from being viewed with others, not because it’s scary or upsetting, but because it raises so many issues for debate.  The ending alone is open to a number of differing interpretations, not about George’s decision but rather why he makes it.

Sublime’s questions are important.  Can we take responsibility for the happiness of others; is it better to pull our prejudices out into the light and face them or push them down and pretend we don’t have them; when does life end and how should be approach it?  These are just some of the subjects the movie touches on, but subtlety is not Sublime’s strong point.  Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs delivers a powerful performance as the black bogey man tormenting the comatose George and eventually driving him to stare his fear in the face, but naming him “Mandingo”… really?  Zoe the nurse looks so much like a porn fantasy that she signals the twist even before it arrives.  If explanatory flashbacks are not your thing, then you’ll probably throw a shoe at the screen before the movie is half over.  And did I mention it’s long and sluggishly paced and its weird scenes owe visual debts to Jacob’s Ladder and Riget [The Kingdom]?

For all these flaws Sublime is worth watching, though probably not the night before you go in for a colonoscopy.  At the center of each of its huge, in your face, artificially shiny pearls is a gritty little nugget of truth.  Despite their best endeavors doctors and nurses do make mistakes and end up doing harm.  For many people the quality of health care they receive will not depend on their need but on their wealth.  However open minded and liberal we profess to be on the surface, deep inside many of us will harbor unwholesome preconceptions about other people.  For many folk their religious beliefs will conflict with their medical requirements.  We will think that we know what is best for those we love, even if we don’t.  At the end of the day there are some decisions that an individual must make for themselves.

I wasn’t expecting this film to make me think so much, not least because it has a terribly inappropriate DVD cover.  They are big questions with no easy answers and kudos to Sublime for asking them at all.  It’s still not weird enough, though.  Sorry.

On a lighter note: I was interested to see that American nurses also take the Nightingale Oath; it was nice to see an appearance by our old friend necrotizing fasciitis; and a sympathectomy isn’t what I hoped it was going to be at all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…when you’ve got a guy named Mandingo running around with a pair of garden shears, you’re in a rare kind of movie.”–Christopher Null, AMC Filmcritic.com (DVD)

DIRECTED BY: Christopher Nolan

FEATURING: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano

PLOT:  A man suffering from an inability to form short term memories hunts for his

wife’s murderer, relying on notes he leaves himself and important facts he tattoos on his body.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It isn’t weird.  Other than the unconventional narrative structure, Memento could even be viewed as a bit of hardcore realism.   But it is easy to see why lovers of the weird are attracted to it; the cloudy mystery that attaches to the story and its central cipher doesn’t lift until the very end, creating a disorientation that feels subjectively weird even though the story is actually firmly grounded in reality.

COMMENTS: Here, I’ll make it easy for you with this paragraph.  To appreciate just how intricately Memento is constructed, and how big of an accomplishment the movie is, try reading the sentences in a story or essay backwards, from the last to the first, and see how much sense they make and how satisfying the experience is.  This time, it’s executed flawlessly.  The movie is epistemologically pessimistic, but artistically invigorating; it’s one of those rare, unique plot hooks that come around once or twice a decade, and you can only hope the filmmakers don’t compromise and do invest the extra work required to pull it off.  It’s a simple concept but far more than a gimmick; the inversion of cause and effect works wonders.  Nothing distracts our attention from trying to unravel the puzzle.  The direction and the performances by the three principals are professionally transparent; the script is the star, as it should be in a mystery.  Leonard insists that memory is faulty, eye witness testimony is unreliable, and that the only thing he can depend on is facts—the notes he inks indelibly on his own body—but as the story works its way from the conclusion to the origin, we start to suspect that there may be nothing that we can accept at face value.  It quickly becomes apparent that it would be easy to manipulate someone with Leonard’s condition, and we have as much reason as he does to be suspicious of his two principal hangers-on: the unctuous Joe Pantoliano, who looks and acts like a small-time con-man, and beaten down (and beaten up) bartender Carrie-Anne Moss, whose seductive smile and distant eyes scream “femme fatale.”  To keep us as in the dark as Leonard is, Christopher Nolan tells his story in a series of flashbacks that continually move backwards in time; when the next scene begins, we’re thrown into the middle of the action with as little context as Leonard has.  But where did he get that nifty sports jacket, and his expensive sports car, and that scar on his face?  To figure out what’s going on, he relies on notes that he scrawls and checks wherever he can; whenever he meets someone new, he reaches into the pocket of his natty white coat and hopes to find a Polaroid with the stranger’s name and some pertinent information printed on it.  The one constant that sticks in his mind is that he’s hunting his wife’s killer; he’s tattooed the suspect’s name, along with numerous clues, onto his torso.  This is because he’s lost the ability to form short-term memories: after ten minutes or so, he forgets everything except for the facts he knew before a sap to the head sent him bonkers, and must reorient himself to the present.  When Leonard finds himself running through the rows of a trailer park parallel to another runner, he must calmly decide whether he’s doing the chasing, or whether he himself is being hunted down.  Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby has to overcome a handicap that would cause a lesser revenge killer throw up his hands in despair and take up an easier movie vocation, like becoming a ruthless rich bastard and trying to steal the heart of a woman away from a guileless nice guy by bolstering her misconceptions about his innocent kiss with a romantic rival.

Memento‘s uniqueness confounds the tagging system.  It’s not a typical amnesia movie—Leonard only forgets recent events, but he remembers his identity and purpose—but it shares enough similarities with amnesia movies to be listed alongside them.  Also,  it’s technically not a particularly nonlinear movie; only one important scene (shot black and white) occurs out of sequence.  Yet, anyone who’s looking for a nontraditional narrative structure would do themselves a disservice by skipping the brilliant Memento, which mucks up time but plays fair with the viewer according to its own set of rules.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…like an existential crossword puzzle, or a pungent 50′s B-thriller with a script by Jorge Luis Borges… a brilliant feat of rug-pulling, sure to delight fans of movies like ‘The Usual Suspects’ and ‘Pi.’”–A.O. Scott, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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

FEATURING: Julia Voth, Erin Cummings, America Olivo

PLOT: Three chesty babes fight punk interlopers, each other, and the screenwriters’

over-infatuation with flashbacks while searching for a treasure in the desert.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s postmodern pretensions and post-Memento plotting show an ambition for the offbeat, but the producers ultimately understand that it’s cleavage shots and catfights that pay the bills.  An absurdly overdeveloped plot, exaggerated B-movie archetypes, and crazy flashback set pieces staged before unconvincing but imaginative green screen vistas turn Bitch Slap a slightly weirder, but not weird enough, version of a typical late night cable jigglefest.

COMMENTS:  A Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! homage made with a sub-Tarantino snarkiness, Bitch Slap plays fine if you go in with the right (i.e., low) expectations.  The three actresses do well and tackle their roles with relish—Olivo is particularly memorable as Camaro, the pill-popping psycho—but the metaphysically threatening sexuality of a Tura Satana is missing from this batch of castrating Amazons.  Great satire it is not, and at times too much winking self-awareness threatens to sink it, but in the end the correct spirit of silliness almost always  prevails.  It’s one thing when a sleaze rock anthem starts playing and the camera goes slo-mo and split-screen while zooming  leeringly on the ladies’ sweaty bosoms and provocatively cocked hips as they shovel in the desert dressed in tank-tops or tattered evening gowns.  It’s another level of goofiness altogether when the gals temporarily forget about the crime kingpin who’s hunting them down so that they can cool off by throwing jugs of ice water onto one another.  Back stories are revealed in frequent flashbacks, but these serve little function other than allowing the filmmakers to set up crazed green screen set-pieces.  There’s a magical realist scene where a sparkling angel-winged dancer takes stage as the strip club DJ improbably spins “Ave Maria,” a nunsploitation interlude, and a ridiculous shootout on the Las Vegas Strip (which plays even funnier when you realize that the characters, posed in front of scattered neon landmarks, must be firing their automatic weapons at each other from miles away with no possible lines of sight).  Add into the mix a chick-fighting Japanese schoolgirl named Kinki wielding a flesh-rending yo-yo, and there’s enough craziness to keep weirdsploitation fans entertained.  In keeping with the post-feminist theme (a character conspicuously carries around a tome bearing the title “Slutty Bitches in Post-feminist America”), there’s no actual nudity from the leads.  The bitch-goddess archetypes here keep their goodies conspicuously displayed on the shelf, but don’t give away free previews; their mammary charms are just bait.  Men are of little use to them; the three prefer to make love (and war) with each other.  The male cast are annoyances to be disposed with as quickly as possible, after they’ve been actually or symbolically castrated.  This is empowering female iconography, though only to gorgeous lesbians with gigantic breasts.  A major downside to the film is the fact that it goes on about twenty minutes too long; the spell the flick casts seeps away the longer it plays.  This is the rare sexploitation case where drastically trimming down the lesbian love scenes and catfights would actually have helped the movie.  Another downer is the recycling of a well-known plot twist from a popular 1990s thriller; it’s not only embarrassingly obvious, but pointless, since twist endings aren’t really a feature of the genre they’re spoofing anyway.  Still, if you can overlook those flaws, and the fact that the movie projects the sense that it believes it’s smarter than its Russ Meyer source material (it isn’t), you may find that Bitch Slap isn’t a total bust.

The director and producer previously worked on the syndicated television series “Hercules: The Legendary Adventures” and “Xena: Warrior Princess,” and Kevin Sorbo, Lucy Lawless and Rene O’Connor all show up in bit roles.  Stunt coordinator Zoe Bell worked on “Xena” and also as a stunt double for Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill and Grindhouse.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“..despite these (and other) glitches, there’s a grungy vigor to Bitch Slap at its very best moments…there’s also just enough carnage, cans, and plain old weirdness to keep the wheels spinning throughout. (Every time I started to get bored with the flick, it threw something new and weirder into the mix. In B-grade jiggle-action homages, that kind of stuff can go a long way.)”–Scott Weinberg, FEAR.net

DIRECTED BY: Martin Scorsese

FEATURING: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams

PLOT: A U.S. Marshall with a tragic past investigates a mysterious disappearance at an

asylum for the criminally insane on a craggy, isolated Massachusetts island in the 1950s.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Scorsese sprinkles a few flakes of weirdness into his mainstream thriller for flavor, but it’s carefully tailored for the mild tastes of the masses.

COMMENTS:  Atmosphere and suspense rule as Scorsese leaves film’s mainland to investigate the genre islands.  With a horror movie aesthetic, a film noir hero and a brainteaser mystery plot, Shutter Island is a mini-history of popular movie mechanics, with some psychology and dark drama thrown in to provide a sense of gravitas.  It’s no masterpiece, but it does effectively draw you into its mysterious labyrinth for two hours.  Overwrought in the best way, this is the type of movie where portentous strings keep coming at the viewer like driving sheets of rain in a hurricane, key scenes take place in darkened cells filled with the criminally insane or in ruined cemeteries, and Nazis, lobotomizing surgeons, and drug-induced hallucinations all play a part in the paranoid plot.  DiCaprio puts in a fine performance as Teddy Daniels, a tough guy whose callous exterior may just be scar tissue from the wounds he’s suffered in a tough life.  A war veteran who was present at the liberation of the Dachau death camps, Daniels may have committed acts that still haunt him; returning home, he turns to booze and then quickly suffers further tragedy when he loses his young wife to a violent tragedy.  Guilt, regret and lust for revenge haunt our hero, and impede his investigation of the murderess who’s disappeared from her locked cell as surely as does administrator Ben Kingsley’s odd reluctance to hand over patient medical files to the two federal marshals.  Scorsese plumbs DiCaprio’s psyche for spooky dream sequences, such as one where he embraces his dead wife while ash falls around them like snow; as the scene progresses her back turn into a burning cinder, while a cascade of blood simultaneously soaks the front of her dress.  As the flick progresses, reality becomes plastic and the seeming illogic of the plot increases; DiCaprio’s flashbacks and dreams take up a larger portion of the action and sometimes bleed into the real world.  Despite a mounting sense of weirdness, though, all is resolved rationally at the end.

You may guess the final twist, or you may not.  The true test of a mystery/thriller is not whether the twist ending surprises you—it’s a bonus if it does and will make the movie a classic, but there are only so many unthought-of tricks that a director can deploy without cheating.  Our capacity to be surprised depends more on cinematic inexperience than anything else.  The true virtue of a thriller is not to fool us but to put us inside the endangered shoes of the protagonist, and fill us with doubts as to our safety, understanding, even sanity.  When this movie’s clicking, the suspense is high and the Gothic atmosphere is thick and beautiful, making it well worth the short ferry ride out to Shutter Island.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…like a Hardy Boys mystery directed by David Lynch.”–Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Thomas Jane

FEATURING: Thomas Jane, Ron Perlman, Laurie German

PLOT: Two blissful newlyweds driving back home from their wedding in Las Vegas

Vegas hit a man in the middle of the road. He lives, but the couple finds he is not all that he seems, and are forced to take drastic measures against him.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: Dark Country is a bit obtuse at times, and it frustratingly delights fans of the obscure by not explaining its motives or workings very often, but I hesitate recommending mainly because it relies a little too heavily on genre standbys and noir reverence instead of blazing new fantastic territory. It is a 50s thriller/noir mixed with a modern horror, but it cannot create its own identity between the two stylings.  There are moments of heavy cinematic distortion and interesting ideas that run through the story like a highway across the hungry desert, but it can’t quite escape some level of mediocrity as it bends prostrate for that which has already been done.

COMMENTS:  Dark Country represents a promising debut effort from a director who is willing to try new things. What’s really impressive from the start is the writing.  It is intense and full of good, genuine human touches that help the movie flow from scene to scene.  From the first scene to the end, I felt rapt with attention to these immersive characters and their odd relationship, especially after the drive out of Las Vegas ensues.

It is a journey through dark and unforgiving territory, perhaps a metaphor for the new marriage between main characters Gina and Dick, newlyweds who don’t really know what they’re in for.  The young couple just made it official in Vegas, and are ready to go home, but even before their fateful accident, things aren’t what they seem between them.  There is tension, there are incidents between the two that are hinted at, and they have secrets from each other right off the bat.  After their encounter in the desert with the strange man they hit, things only get worse between them.   From an artistic standpoint, Dark Country can be commended as a smart thriller with some brains to back up its craziness.

Visually, it’s a feast for the eyes,  and it’s tonally interesting.  Thomas Jane wants a very engrossing visual experience, but he is also on a budget here, so we are caught in a limbo of many special effects, none of which really hit the mark in a spectacular way.  The CG is on the cheap side (it looks like a violent episode of “Reboot” when they wreck the car near the end!)  The green screen is not very successful in melding the real and fake, but the color effects are interesting, not to mention plentiful, and we are treated to some good old fashioned camera trickery with slick editing and nifty shots.

But while it’s a solid debut for Jane, and an offbeat one at that, we’re still not treading across any bold frontiers with Dark Country.  This is a movie I have seen before, in bits and pieces: intense psychological implications, a noir aesthetic, and the lush, frightening mysteries of the deep desert.  It’s not anything breathtaking or unflinchingly bold.  It’s a good and often disturbing take on some classic thriller ideas, and it has a twist in the story that will have you thinking on your toes for a while, but I wouldn’t consider this to be one of the weirdest movies I’d ever seen.  With a good cast, a taut script, some interesting effects, and a more intelligent angle than your average thriller, Dark Country has a lot going for it. Just don’t expect it to be too weird, because you might be disappointed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The developments in Tab Murphy’s script are never quite as shocking to us as they are to Dick and Gina, and the story eventually builds the feeling of marking time on the way to its TWILIGHT ZONE-esque resolution… Jane’s visual sense assures that the film is always a spooky pleasure to watch, though…”–Micgael Gingold, Fangoria (contemporaneous)