All posts by Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies)

Gregory J. Smalley founded 366 Weird Movies in 2008 and has served as editor-in-chief since that time. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society, and his film writing has appeared online in Pop Matters and The Spool.
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CAPSULE: LIGHT YEARS (2019)

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DIRECTED BY: Colin Thompson

FEATURING: Colin Thompson, Russell Posner, Makenzie Leigh

PLOT: A man takes psychedelic mushrooms on the anniversary of his friend’s death and relives a mushroom trip they had together when they were sixteen.

Still from Light Years (2019)

COMMENTS: The hinted-at plot in Light Years never really develops. Instead, what happens is that we watch a trio of likable kids nervously score mushrooms, take mushrooms, try to hold it together without their parents finding out they’re high on mushrooms, go to a high school party on mushrooms, chop wood at midnight (on… you get the idea), and generally just hang out. The movie is light, as its title implies. The mood is nostalgic, like The Wonder Years—on mushrooms. There’s not a lot in the way of a meaningful ongoing story— although there are lots of incidents—and really only token character development. The story is framed as an elegy for Kevin’s friend Briggs, who died under circumstances that aren’t relevant to the movie, and what it does well is to capture the carefree pleasure of teenage camaraderie. You can tell, without even looking at the end credits disclaimer stating that the film was inspired by actual events, that it’s based on writer/director Colin Thompson’s real life experiences. There’s no other possible explanation for the movie’s existence.

The acting is unexpectedly decent. Pimply Briggs (Russell Posner) actually looks and acts like a high school sophomore, with an unselfconscious awkwardness and endearingly goofy mannerisms, like the ghoulish open-faced smile he routinely breaks into. He and Kevin have a real chemistry, sharing a private ritual where they spar with improvised dialogue in increasingly silly voices. This chemistry is more remarkable due to the fact that young Kevin is (most of the time) played by old Kevin, the heavily-stubbled-and-clearly-not-a-teenager Colin Thompson. Thompson also plays—again, most of the time—the third friend, Larry; and, in drag, he also takes the roles of his own ex, and the mom of the kid who’s throwing a keg party for the high schoolers and bringing along a tray of jello shots, and a lot of the extras. All these Kevins appear partly because of a subtext that Kevin is a narcissist. But mainly it’s just a part of the director’s trip-disorientation strategy, one that also includes abrupt changes in film stock, occasional collage-style montages and music videos, video warping and glitching, and animated characters appearing in the unused corners of the film (recurring cartoon characters like a cutout of adult Kevin’s dog, and some kind of derp-faced flying cat in a sailor cap).

The thought that Light Years inspires most in me is the question: is psychedelic cinema a legitimate subgenre? Despite the possibilities for deep introspection psychedelics promise, the “trip movie” rarely features any kind of serious plot or philosophy; it’s almost always an excuse for stylistic and technical experimentation. A short line of (almost) non-narrative movies beginning with The Trip seek to recreate the feeling and experience of being on psychedelic drugs for the audience. The hallucinatory qualities of psychedelics are easy (and fun!) to symbolize visually, but the experience of having your brain’s natural neurotransmitters temporarily pranked by chemical interlopers—the complex combination of euphoria, wonder, anxiety and confusion—is harder to reproduce. In the most successful trip film, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, scenes of Hunter S. Thompson enjoying cocktails in a Vegas lounge surrounded by kitschy dinosaurs, or trying to redeem his hotel reservation while the desk clerk’s face warps unpredictably, effectively recreate the edginess of druggy disorientation. But that movie works on multiple levels: as drug porn, sure, but also as a straight-out comedy, and as a dual-edged social satire of both the dominant 1960s culture and of the very subculture it superficially celebrates. Light Years is not quite light years away from that achievement, but it does suggest that hallucinations alone can only take a movie so far. LSD has been around, on film and in life, for six decades now; it’s no longer novel or outrageous, merely naughty. A trip is not enough to sustain a great film; you need a plot and/or a deeper theme to carry you across the finish line.

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CAPSULE: LOVE EXPRESS: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF WALERIAN BOROWCZYK (2018)

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DIRECTED BY: Kuba Mikurda

FEATURING: , Noël Véry, , , Peter Bradshaw, Slavoj Zizek,

PLOT: A talking heads documentary about the rise and fall of Polish director Walerian Borowczyk, who started out as an enfant terrible of Surrealism but ended up stereotyped and dismissed as a pornographer.

Still from Love Express: The Disappearance of Walerian Borowczyk (2018)

COMMENTS: A Polish expatriate working in his adopted France, Walerian Borowczyk began his career as an acclaimed Surrealist animator, working in both stop-motion and traditional forms. Over two decades, he produced almost two-dozen award-winning films featuring milk-drinking wigs (The House, 1958) and blue-bleeding angels (Angel’s Games, 1964). His live action debut, 1969’s dystopian parable Goto: The Island of Love, was highly anticipated and a critical success. His career took a sharp turn with Immoral Tales (1973), an arty erotic portmanteau film which was shocking for the time, but not especially surreal. Tales was a succès de scandale, but it lost Borowczyk some critical support; that erosion accelerated greatly with his followup film, the outrageous bestiality tale The Beast [La Bête] (1975). Banned all over the world, it is here that Borowczyk’s career begins to decline. He is pigeonholed, and producers only fund him if he agrees to film overtly erotic movies. Soon, he’s paired with softcore siren Sylvia Kristel for the flop The Streetwalker (1976), and his fortunes fall further. Borowczyk does manage to make a few more interesting and ambitious films in the late 70s and 80s (such as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Osborne, 1981) but, in the public and the industry’s eyes, he’s just a pornographer. By 1987 he has fallen so low that he’s called on to helm Emmanuelle 5. But he’s disinterested in the project, and walks off set after he’s disrespected by top-billed scream queen Monique Gabrielle (according to the assistant director who actually completed the movie, she may have slapped him). He releases one more film, the arty Love Rites, but that’s it; Borowczyk disappears as a feature filmmaker at age 64.

The paragraph above contains all the essential information you’ll learn from Love Express: The Disappearance of Walerian Borowczyk. There are a few juicy tidbits here and there, but the documentary is essentially an excuse for a parade of high profile cinephile fans—critic Peter Bradshaw, cinematographer Noël Véry, the always delightful Slavoj Zizek, and others—to say nice things about Borowczyk. Indeed, large parts of the movie are made in the YouTube-inspired “reaction video” genre, as directors Terry Gilliam and Neil Jordan watch clips from Borowoczyk films in real time (admittedly, Gilliam’s amused shock at The Beast‘s rape scene is priceless). It is interesting to see Lisbeth Hummel’s conflicted reminiscences about filming The Beast (unexpectedly, she seems more traumatized by the rose scene than the rape.) But overall, Love Express is merely an appreciation and celebration of Borowoczyk, as it pretty much was fated to be—because who’s going to dial up a Borowoczyk documentary other than someone who’s already a Borowoczyk fan? Pleasant enough, and, at a crisp 75 minutes, short enough to not outstay its welcome. Someday it will make a fine Blu-ray extra on a Borowoczyk  box set.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A patchy primer to the magnificently weird career of the 20th century’s foremost animator/auteur/pornographer, Love Express: The Disappearance of Walerian Borowczyk (Love Express. Przypadek Waleriana Borowczyka) illuminates and frustrates in roughly equal measure.”–Neil Young, Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)

 

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“ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY”: THE ABKCO/ARROW 4K RESTORATION BOX SET

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The documentary Psychomagic, A Healing Art may not be the film will be remembered for, but as an excuse to remaster and re-release his trilogy of hippie-era cult masterpieces from 1968-1973, it’s a huge hit. It’s also a great bonus disc to accompany this box of miracles.

If you’re just a young ‘un, or you’ve lived your life under a rock and have never been exposed to the esoteric movies of Alejandro Jodorowsky, here’s a brief primer, confining itself to their history (since, as The Holy Mountain‘s trailer warns, nothing in your experience or education can prepare you for the actual films). The Chilean expatriate director made a splash in 1970 with El Topo, a surreal spaghetti western about a mystical gunfighter, which was championed by John Lennon and made history as the first midnight movie. The success of El Topo allowed Jodorowsky to fund the even more extravagant The Holy Mountain in 1973, a film about a quest for immortality that contains such memorable and trippy scenes as a Christ figure eating a life-sized statue of Christ, and a slaughter of innocents where victims bleed paint and doves fly out of gaping bullet wounds. Before these two hits, Jodorowsky had made Fando y Lis (1968) in Mexico. It’s a seldom-seen road movie about a man and a paraplegic woman seeking the mythical city of Tar. Fando y Lis was even stranger and more irrational than the midnight movies that succeeded it, closer to the director’s roots in classic surrealism (Jodorowsky was one of the youngest and last members of Andre Breton’s Surrealist circle, although he broke with Breton to form his own offshoot, the Panic Movement).

El Topo and The Holy Mountain were huge counterculture hits, but Jodorowsky’s career stalled after he was sacked from a planned adaptation of Frank Hebert’s Dune , and he did not resume filmmaking until the late 80s. Even worse, Jodorowsky quarreled with distributor Allen Klein, who spitefully locked the director’s two big midnight hits into ABCKO’s vaults, keeping them out of sight (except for the bootleg copies that kept their legends alive). The pair made up in 2007, when El Topo and The Holy Mountain were released on DVD and recirculated in cinemas for the first time.

Jodorowsky 4K Restoration Blu-ray box setThe current box set, which brings Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain together with Psychomagic, is not the first Jodorowsky collection from ABCKO. These three films had been released previously on DVD as “The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky,” and many of the extra features here are duplicated on the earlier set. It’s understandable that some fans who bought the previous collection may wonder whether double-dipping is worth it. So to begin, here’s what’s recycled from Continue reading “ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY”: THE ABKCO/ARROW 4K RESTORATION BOX SET →

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CAPSULE: PSYCHOMAGIC, A HEALING ART (2019)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Alejandro Jodorowsky

PLOT: Surrealist director-cum-therapist Alejandro Jodorowsky describes his own variant of psychotherapy, which involves patients undergoing rituals such as smashing pumpkins with family member’s faces on them or recreating their own births.

Still from psychomagic, a healing art (2019)

COMMENTS: Psychomagic, A Healing Art raises three questions: 1. Is “psychomagic” a revolutionary (or even a valid) form of psychotherapy? 2. Does Psychomagic tell us something about Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s personal and artistic philosophy? And, 3. Is it worth watching?

Most people will answer the first question “probably not.” Jodorowsky takes us through just over a dozen hand-selected case studies, all apparent successes, but with no long term followups. One subject, a man who seems to be cured of his stuttering, looks like an impressive triumph—but for all we know the man is stumbling over his words again as I type this. It goes without saying that Jodorowsky’s theories haven’t been tested or peer reviewed. But Jodorowsky specifically and deliberately characterizes psychomagic is a healing art, not a healing science—and it may be closer to faith healing than to either. There’s no doubt that, among people who are already motivated to fix their emotional problems (and who don’t mind looking ridiculous), a shamanistic ritual—especially a needlessly elaborate one recommended by a trusted guru—is a promising way to invoke the placebo effect. As a discipline, though, psychomagic’s efficacy is especially limited by the fact that the school has a single practitioner, one who relies on his personal charisma more than any other tool. Only those who are already true Jodoworskians will buy that psychomagic is the therapeutic breakthrough the director wants us to believe in.

You’ll be more likely to answer the question of whether Psychomagic reveals something significant about Jodorowsky in the affirmative. In the final stage of his career, the renaissance that began with 2013’sThe Dance of Reality, Jodorowsky’s work has turned from the explicitly mystical to the explicitly autobiographical. In Psychomagic, he illustrates each case study with a similar clip or two from his own movies. When he asks a man to fasten a photograph of his father to a helium balloon and send it to the heavens, he shows a similar balloon scene from Endless Poetry; he recycles an idea from Tusk and re-purposes it as couple’s therapy.  Jodorowsky has been frank about his strained relationship with his distant, macho father, revelations which may start to color the way you look at the father-son relationship in El Topo. You may be led to ponder: have the elaborately staged, ritualistic scenes in Jodorowsky’s early movies been a form of self-therapy all along? Is his whole corpus psychomagic?

And for the final question: even though there doesn’t seem to be too much to psychomagic, is the film worth watching? For deep Jodorowsky fans, the answer is obvious (and moot). For more casual followers, it’s iffy: I’d prioritize the narrative films (skipping Tusk) first, then tackle this as a supplement if you’re fascinated by the man behind those extravagantly esoteric movies. The scenes we see in Pyschomagic often resemble sequences from a Jodorowsky movie enacted by amateurs on a low budget. For example, our stutterer dresses up like Donald Duck and rides the teacups at Euro Disney, then lets Alejandro grab his testicles to transfer manly energy, then is painted gold and sent out into the streets to recite poetry. Some of the patients’ confessions are so painfully raw (a woman whose fiance committed suicide, an octogenarian in deep depression) that they feel unpleasantly voyeuristic, and there’s also some menstrual self-portraiture to be wary of. But it wouldn’t be much of a Jodorowsky movie if there weren’t moments that made you want to look away, would it?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Thankfully, Jodo’s latest is also way too weird to be hagiographic. It’s indulgent, absurd, frustrating, and more than a little gross. It’s also idiosyncratic and funny enough, and in ways that Jodo’s fans will probably love.”–Simon Abrams, RogerEbert.com (contemporaneous)

Capsules, Miscellanea

DEATH LAID AN EGG (1968) DIRECTOR’S CUT SPECIAL EDITION

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For our complete discussion of Death Laid an Egg, read the Canonically Weird entry.

I was thrilled in 2017 when ‘s chicken-centric surrealist giallo Death Laid an Egg finally hatched on DVD (until that time, it had only been available on VHS or poor-quality overseas bootlegs). One thing I did find room to complain about, however, was the loss of the absurd English dubbing, which added an additional layer of dementia to the already insane proceedings.  Cult Epics new Special Edition rerelease of the film answers that reservation, and throws in a few more surprises not on the previous release—most importantly, an additional 20 minutes of footage, now restored to produce a Director’s Cut version seen here for the first time since Death debuted.

Death Laid an Egg key artA true surrealist shock for 1968 viewers, Death Laid an Egg was not a hit on release, and was barely seen outside Italy. By 1970, however, the success of ‘s Bird with the Crystal Plumage was creating an international market for the Italian giallo. At 104 minutes, the already challenging (some would say incoherent) Death Laid an Egg featured far too much arty oddness and socialist satire to please the punters, but it did boast an exploitable amount of blood, sex, and a pair of gorgeous female leads in Gina Lollabrigida and . About fifteen minutes were trimmed, and Death was dubbed into English and released as Plucked, the version that most of the world has seen since. (This is the “Cliffs Notes” version of the release history, since actually at least two separate cuts of the film were made and released: see the excellent Movie Censorship entry for a more complete discussion).

The newly restored scenes mostly involve a character named Luigi, an old colleague of the protagonist whose significance (like so much in the film) is never made wholly clear. In a typical Questi twist, Luigi is partly amnesiac due to having undergone electroshock therapy. Other restorations involve a near topless scene for Aulin, gritty scenes of real poultry processing, Anna making elliptically morbid comments while looking at chicken embryo slides, and another encounter with the dispossessed farm workers. In a film where so many details and subplots are merely playful wild goose chases, the newly restored footage is, in some sense, inconsequential (although some have argued that Luigi’s character is crucial). But in any case, fifteen or twenty additional minutes of Death Laid an Egg is a blessing to be relished.

This edition gives you the option to watch the 90-minute dubbed version (Plucked) or the 104-minute director’s cut.  (You can watch the director’s cut with the English dub on; it just changes to subtitles when new footage plays, which also lets you know what’s new). As I did in my original review, I still contend that whoever did the translation for the dubbed version improved on the dialogue versus the person who translated the subtitles. The dialogue simultaneously sounds more natural to English-speakers and more poetic. “I think that’s a peculiar way to put it, men and chickens mixed up like that,” is snappier than the subtitle’s rendition of the same line, “This is a bit dubious, I think. How can you humanize chickens like that?” The spoken line “Your bra and panties are almost as important as what’s under them” is much more to the point than the written version, “lingerie is the most important. It’s almost more important than the skin underneath.” It’s likely that the original cast (the four principals included two Frechmen and a Swede) were dubbed into Italian anyway, so there’s no question of linguistic authenticity: in this case, go with the superior English dub.

Giallo scholar Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson (of Mondo Digital) provide an informative commentary track. Wisely, neither try to interpret the film’s many mysteries and peculiarities, but limit themselves to supplying context and background on Questi, the cast and crew, and the Italian film industry of the time. Other special features include two trailers, a video review by Antonio Bruchini, Questi’s last recorded interview (he doesn’t discuss Death Laid an Egg), and one of the director’s final short films, 2002’s “Doctor Schizo and Mister Phrenic.” In the interview Questi seems quite proud of the short, but I found it sad to see a man who once shot big-budget films with movie stars on location reduced to starring in his own camcorder YouTube uploads, set entirely in his own apartment.

Death Laid an Egg postcard
Postcard art featuring “Luigi”

Early editions of this set come with a slipcase and a package of collectible postcards. The only advantage Cult Epics previous release has over this one is that it includes a DVD copy (older limited releases also contained the rare Bruno Maderna soundtrack CD). But this is the Egg we’ve been dying for.