Monthly Archives: December 2010

Top 10 Lists

TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES OF 2010

6 Comments

Happy New Year!  Looking back on 2010, we have to say that it was about two or three weird movies shy of being a great year; a lot of films that may end up being 2010 standouts haven’t made it out of the festival circuit yet.  But we did see a bonanza of great weird Region 1 DVD debuts from years past, including Antichrist (2009), Bronson (2008), Dillinger is Dead (1969), Hausu (1977), Taxidermia (2006) and You, the Living (2007), not to mention a restored version of Metropolis (1927), with footage that had been missing for almost 100 years!  So, it would be hard to say 2010 was a total waste.  Here’s our New Year’s Eve rundown of the weirdest movies of 2010 (so far):

  1. Enter the Void, the Weirdest Movie of 2010?Enter the Void: We had to cheat a little to qualify Gaspar Noé‘s neon psychedelic death-trip about a hallucinating expat ghost in Tokyo who sees his sister and best friend making love with glowing genitalia by reclassifying the film from 2009 (copyright date) to 2010 (date the editing was completed and the final version released to theaters), but it was worth it to get the most extravagant Buddhism-on-LSD movie of the last 35 years the top spot.
  2. Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) [Prezít svuj zivot (teorie a praxe)]: We’re cheating even more by nominating Jan Svankmajer‘s latest (about a man who impregnates his own anima while undergoing psychoanalysis) because we haven’t even seen it yet.  But based on what we know about the crazy Czech, and what we see in the trailer below, we don’t think we’ll be eating any crow over this choice (unless it’s for not giving Surviving Life the top spot).

  3. Black Swan: Darren Aronofsky makes Natalie Portman go crazy for her art in a dance fable mixing backstage melodrama, sexual repression, and body horror.  Portman growing feathers onstage as she dances her little heart out for the audience rates as the most beautifully weird moment of the year. Continue reading TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES OF 2010 →
Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 12/30/2010

Leave a comment

2010 ends in a theatrical whimper. Still, we take a look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…

Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

The Strange Case of Angelica [O Estranho Caso de Angélica] (2010):  The romantic story of a photographer who sees the dead as the living when he looks through his camera, from 101-year old (!) director Manoel de Oliveira.  I remember the critics being lukewarm on this one at festival screenings, but the NYC press is falling over themselves praising it now.  Opens in Manhattan this week at the IFC Center, with scattered dates throughout early 2011 in Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Rochester NY, Boulder CO, Seattle, and Columbus.  The Strange Case of Angelica official site.

NEW ON DVD:

Legacy (2010): A Black-Ops agent holes up in a hotel room after a botched mission and loses touch with reality. This mindbender was intended as a breakthrough role for TV star Idris Elba (“The Wire”), but it was barely released to theaters. Buy Legacy.

Skeletons (2010): Here’s one we overlooked when it was released in October. The storyline of this absurd comedy concerns two “exorcists” who literally remove skeletons from families’ closets. This was named “Best British Feature Film” at the Edinburgh Film Festival, over another nominee we have our eye on—Jackboots on the Whitehall, the puppet show about Nazis taking over England. Buy Skeletons.

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

Dr. Tarr’s Torture Dungeon [AKA The Mansion of Madness] (1973): Despite the exploitative title, this is an arty and atmospheric adaptation of the Edgar Allen Poe story “The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether.”  There’s memorable imagery of lunatics doing looney things, but the film is quite slow. Watch Dr. Tarr’s Torture Dungeon free on YouTube.

What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

ELVIS (1979) & THIS IS ELVIS (1981)

Leave a comment

The life of Elvis Presley is “the” perfect American grand guignol tale that has never really been captured on film. John Carpenter’s Elvis (1979) has finally been released in its full three hour European theatrical version. Some consider it to still be the best film on the subject of Elvis.

Elvis Presley was undoubtedly a phenomenon. He was as poor white trash as poor white trash can get. He grew up in a predominantly black Pentecostal church. Many African-Americans have accused him of stealing their music. Actually, it’s all he knew, and he treated it with reverence. Accusations of racism are certainly factual, but only from an off-color perspective. Like Sammy Davis, Jr., Elvis had an intense self-loathing for his own blackness.

Elvis, the dirt poor mama’s boy, filled his flights of fancy with whipped cream dreams of being a movie star more than anything else; but it was his voice, his extrovert sexual chemistry, and being in the right place at the right time, coupled with his insatiable, singular drive, and securing shrewd management, that catapulted him into the status of an American icon.

Still from Elvis (1979)One element that is sorely missing from all of the films and documentaries on him was Elvis’ early sense of perfection in the recording studios. He often demanded up to forty takes on one song.

Elvis was one of the first and certainly the biggest artist whose career was built on eclecticism. The Elvis Presley persona was birthed from what he knew and what he wanted to be in his Walter Mitty-like romantic fantasies. Elvis was part Mahalia Jackson (his gospel recordings are second only to hers), part Dean Martin, part James Dean, part Marlon Brando, and part Rudolph Valentino. Later, both Sammy Davis and Liberace would be added to the mix.

As archaic as the myth and screen presence of silent screen Valentino seems now, its Continue reading ELVIS (1979) & THIS IS ELVIS (1981) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: AFTER.LIFE (2009)

2 Comments

DIRECTED BY: Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo

FEATURING: , Liam Neeson,

PLOT: A funeral director must convince an accident victim that she is really dead.

Still from After.Life (2010)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: I took a look at After.Life to determine its weird potential, but aside from the macabre story, I found it be a fairly conventionally psychological thriller.

COMMENTS:   Despite the pretentious dot in the middle of the title, After.Life turns out to be a well-made, offbeat picture.  Christina Ricci, while no Ingrid Bergman, delivers a credible performance even though she is slashed with cherry red lipstick and alternately nude or scantily draped in a clingy, scarlet satin slip for most of the movie.

After a violent car crash, Anna Taylor (Ricci) wakes up on a slab in a mortuary (where else?)  Eliot Deacon, a psychic undertaker (Neeson) must talk her into cooperating with the embalming process and mentally preparing herself for the afterlife.

Blessed/cursed with the gift of second sight which allows him to see the spirits of the deceased, Deacon is exasperated that he must argue and wrestle with every one of his dead clients, none of whom are at first willing accept the reality of their deaths.  Conversing with Deacon, Anna, like her predecessors, refuses to believe she’s dead despite his assurance that she’s in transition to the spirit realm, and that he’s the only one who can help her make the leap into the uncertain beyond

While sill on the steel gurney in the embalming room, Anna has several sinister forays into the ethereal plain to which she is about to permanently transcend.  Frightened, uncertain, and unwilling to depart this dimension to venture into the next, she requires a good bit of coaxing from Deacon.  Anna is a hard case and she makes quite a fuss.  Deacon has his hands full dealing with her and she proves to be his most uncooperative stiff to date.

Matters are complicated when Anna’s mooky boyfriend (Long) shows up demanding to view her body for closure.  Deacon manages to run him off, but the pesky beau just can’t seem to stay away.  He becomes a fly in the pickling balm when he insists upon clinging to the Continue reading CAPSULE: AFTER.LIFE (2009) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: TO DIE FOR TANO [TANO DA MORIRE] (1997)

Leave a comment

DIRECTED BY: Roberta Torre

FEATURING: Ciccio Guarino, Mimma De Rosalia

PLOT: The movie tells the story of the life and death of Palermo mafioso Tano Guarrasi—and

Still from To Die for Tano (1997)

of the newfound freedom of his four ugly sisters who stayed spinsters because no man was brave enough to marry them—in song and dance.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  It’s weird, but given its status as an almost completely unknown movie, it’s not quite outrageously outlandish enough to earn a spot on the List on the first ballot.  A musical production telling the life story of a contemptible macho bully in styles ranging from disco to “gangsta” rap would be strange enough, but director Roberta Torre adds in bizarre dream sequences involving dancing chickens and every 1970s LSD drug trip camera effect she can afford, and films the entire mess as if she’s the long-lost love child of Maya Deren and George Kuchar.  It’s rambunctious and the energy gets to you, but it’s held back by its extreme amateurism (bad singing and choreography can gets wearisome over an hour’s time), and also by the fact that no compelling story or characters ever emerge from the sketch-upon-sketch structure.  Still, it’s one of those movies you may want to track down just so you’ll have something to make your co-workers’ eyes bug out on Monday morning when you talk around the water cooler about what you watched over the weekend.  Recommended for those hunting the obscurest oddities, and anyone who reads this site regularly is likely to find it at least amusing.

COMMENTS:  There’s something gratifying about seeing Sicily’s murderous thugs depicted as a crew of mincing ninnies.  The fact that this gangster spoof is enacted by residents of the city that suffered during the mob’s gangland wars only adds to the elation; their open mockery of their criminal overlords feels brave and subversive, and transmutes the silliness into a strange sort of grandeur.  Though shot in 1997, Tano almost looks like a 1970s production, from the washed out color to the grotesque-looking amateur actors, cheap props and camera tricks, and general “pop avant-garde” feel of an Andy Warhol or John Waters production.  The story (based on real-life events) jumps about in time, usually for little obvious reason, and there are numerous digressions for flashbacks and the absurd musical numbers that are the film’s raison d’être.  The translator earns extra credit for rendering all the songs in rhyme, especially since that practice often results in odd-sounding couplets like “I’ll beat up guys Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: TO DIE FOR TANO [TANO DA MORIRE] (1997) →