DIRECTED BY: Jeremy Alter
FEATURING: Anton Pardoe, Roselyn Sanchez, Patrick Bauchau
PLOT: In a dark, nameless city, a man must return to a city in which he is despised to
save the life of “the one who got away.” He must travel to the rotten heart of this noirish nightscape to get her back, putting his life at [...]
DIRECTED BY: Brad Siberling
FEATURING: Will Ferrell, Anna Friel, Danny McBride
PLOT: Obnoxious scientist Rick Marshall discovers a way to go “sideways” in time to a
world of dinosaurs, ape men and the lizard-like sleestaks in this science fantasy comedy.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s quite a challenge to adapt a 1970s television show about a family [...]
“When I saw a piece of fried bacon fixed to the bathroom wall in Gummo, it knocked me off my chair.”–Werner Herzog
DIRECTED BY: Harmony Korine
FEATURING: Chloë Sevigny, non-professionals chosen for their freakish looks
PLOT: A tornado devastated the town of Xenia, Ohio in the 1970s. Twenty years later, a teenager (Tummler) and a younger tagalong (Solomon) hunt feral [...]
DIRECTED BY: Stuart Gordon
FEATURING: William H. Macy
PLOT: A latently racist and mentally addled accountant leaves his wife, spends
an impossibly long night touring the NYC commercial sex trade and meeting lost souls, and finally ends up in prison.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Edmond isn’t so much weird as terminally confused. It’s true Tarot cards keep [...]
DIRECTED BY: Alfred Eaker & Ross St. Just
FEATURING: Alfred Eaker, PinkFreud
PLOT: ”W” appears in a meteorite in the Arizona desert, steals the election for
the party of No, and becomes a tyrant opposed by liberal reporter BlueMahler.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: With half the characters distinguished by facepaint that makes them look like either World Wrestling [...]
DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin
FEATURING: Alice Krige, Shelley Duvall, Frank Gorshin
PLOT: A prisoner returns to his childhood home on an ostrich farm in a
mythical northern land during the constant daylight of the summer season, where he becomes involved with two mysterious women.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is plenty weird enough to make [...]
“Headmasters never sing!” –line sung by the headmaster in Help! Help! The Globolinks
DIRECTED BY: Joachim Hess, from a production of composer/librettist Giancarlo Menotti
FEATURING: The Hamburg State Opera
PLOT: In this children’s opera, the world has been invaded by bizarre alien creatures named Globolinks, who are allergic to music. A bus full of children returning to boarding school breaks down [...]
Ein Toter hing im Netz, AKA A Corpse Hangs in the Web [literal translation], It’s Hot in Paradise, and others
DIRECTED BY: Fritz Böttger
FEATURING: Alex D’Arcy & buxom German exhibitionists
PLOT: A plane carrying team of eight dancing girls, along with one male and one female manager, crash into the ocean en route to Singapore. There [...]
PLOT: A dowdy nurse contracts an odd strain of the zombie virus which changes her into
a flesh-eating sex maniac.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: There are plenty of weird elements in this low-budget B&W horror comedy, from slightly out-of-sync dubbing to deliberate overacting to Eraserhead-inspired dream sequences, but they seem forced and shallow, like [...]
PLOT: Four college kids are abducted by a backwoods maniac family.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Because the Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoff plot was too tissue-thin to support a movie, heavy metal musician turned debutante director Rob Zombie’s fleshed the film out with stylistic excess. Home movies from inside the serial killers’ psyches, purposeless solarizations, [...]
