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: BAD TIMING (1980)

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AKA Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , ,

PLOT: A woman is rushed to the emergency room; flashbacks explain the troubled relationship between a psychology professor and a free-spirited younger woman that brought them to this pass.

Still from Bad Timing (1980)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Extremely subtle weirdness + adequate Nic Roeg representation on the List already + shrinking available space (only 85 slots left at the time of this writing) make it a bad time for Bad Timing to come along. Had this review been written earlier in this site’s existence, this movie’s layers of mystery might have convinced us to shortlist it, but now we have weirder candidates waiting in the wings.

COMMENTS: Nicolas Roeg shows excellent, if somewhat deceptive, timing with Bad Timing. He feints that he’s about to give us a bittersweet meditation on a failed love affair, but instead probes ever deeper into a psychology of paranoia and obsession, using a subtly dislocating style to keep us off guard. Opposed dualities appear everywhere: male vs. female, rational vs. emotional, East vs. West, law vs. crime. The setup is classic amour fou, pairing successful academic Dr. Alex Linden with the hard-drinking, free-loving Milena. As the relationship is slowly revealed in flashbacks, we see the power balance between the two shift back and forth, as both parties become mired in an increasingly destructive relationship, in different ways. Alex appears coldly rational—Milena bitingly advises him to try to love her instead of trying to understand her—but his advanced training doesn’t inoculate him from human frailty; he’s as subject to jealousy as the next man, and when he falls from his logical perch, he falls hard, into a churning id.

Paranoia and second-guessing are the rule in Alex’s world. The ever-present Cold War background, which is seldom explicitly mentioned, aroused more paranoid associations at the time than it does now. Alex lectures his Intro to Psych students about how everyone is a spy, starting with children peeking on their parent’s lovemaking; later, it appears that the psychiatrist himself is being analyzed by the detective, whose intuition and experience may lead him closer to Alex’s essence than Freudian methodologies would. Alex’s nemesis is a source of mystery and paranoia, too. Harvey Keitel’s obsession with investigating what on the surface seems to be an open-and-shut suicide attempt is itself obsessive, and seems almost unmotivated (until a last minute revelation). Wearing a greasy mullet, Keitel doesn’t make the slightest pretense of being Austrian; I don’t think this is bad casting, but deliberate dissonance, a clue that his character is pure metaphor.

Art Garfunkel, on the other hand, really is bad casting, and his presence damages what could have been an unqualified classic. Roeg’s good taste in casting as an alien The Man Who Fell to Earth doesn’t carry forward here. Not only is Garfunkel a stiff in the acting department, but we’re asked to view him as a suave sex symbol, someone whose magnetism would ensnare the heart of a young woman who could have her pick of any stud in Vienna. Fortunately, an excellent, brave performance from the underappreciated Theresa Russell blows through Art’s inadequacies in their scenes together.

The finale is truly shocking, but well-earned. Also of note is the excellent soundtrack, featuring hits from , Billie Holiday, The Who, and Keith Jarrett. The difficulty of re-securing the rights to all of this music for home video release put Bad Timing out of circulation for many years. It was released to mixed reviews and big controversies: it was rated “X” in the U.S. (a commercial death sentence), and the U.K. distributor called it “sick” and had its logo pulled off prints. Although the film is better appreciated today (even receiving a Criterion Collection release), the furor over Bad Timing led to a perception of Roeg as box office poison. After starting his career off with five memorable films, the director’s career fell off precipitously in the 80s, with 1990’s adaptation The Witches marking a brief comeback to relevance.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“One of Roeg’s most complex and elusive movies, building a thousand-piece jigsaw from its apparently simple story of a consuming passion between two Americans in Vienna.”–Time Out London

(This movie was nominated for review by sometime contributor Eric Gabbard,  who pleaded “The odd juxtapositions and time shifts. It’s a definite weird candidate. Give it a chance.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Canonically Weird (The List)

281. HUGO THE HIPPO (1975)

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Hugó, a Víziló

“If you accept a strange story told to you as true,

Then a certain enlightenment comes to you.”

—Hugo the Hippo theme “It’s Really True” (as sung by Marie Osmond)

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DIRECTED BY: Bill Feigenbaum, József Gémes

FEATURING: Voices of , Burl Ives, Ronnie Cox, Robert Morley

PLOT: The Sultan of Zanzibar kidnaps a herd of African hippopotami and relocates them to Arabia to defend his harbor from sharks. After the shark menace is ended and the city prospers, the citizens forget about the hippos, until one day the hungry herds’ excursion to eat local farmers’ crops leads the Sultan’s evil Vizier Aban-Khan to organize a slaughter of the beasts. Only the youngest, Hugo, escapes; he flees to Dar es Salaam and makes friends with the local children, but Aban-Khan continues to hunt him out of pure malice.

Still from Hugo the Hippo (1975)

BACKGROUND:

  • The story is inspired by an actual hippo nicknamed “Hugo”, who ate farmers’ crops before being adopted by the real Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam.
  • The film was a Hungarian/U.S. co-production. All of the animation was done on the cheap in Hungary. It was released dubbed into both languages.
  • Hugo the Hippo is co-writer/director Bill Feigenbaum’s only film credit. József Gémes went on to direct many Hungarian animated features.
  • Young Marie and Jimmy Osmond perform most of the songs on the soundtrack, along with two songs by Burl Ives and two numbers by jazz/funk session bands.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: It has to be something from the wild vegetable hallucination montage: the apple samurai? Jorma and Hugo climbing onto the space butterfly and sailing through the fruity cosmos? We selected the Dalí-esque shot of three massive monolith potatoes triangulating and transfixing our heroes with the magical beams that shoot from their literal eyes as our take-home image.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Cigarette-smoking shark; cloud massacre; sliced apple ninja

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Hugo the Hippo was released to widespread indifference. Contemporary reviewers were bored and strangely dismissive, failing to catch the undercurrent of weirdness here, but a generation of youngsters scarred by the hippopotamus massacre kept Hugo‘s underground legend alive. The combination of kitschy songs, psychedelic animation, bizarre plotting, tone shifts, hallucinatory episodes, and the inimitable Paul Lynde as an evil hippo-hating vizier blend to create a children’s film gone awry in all the most delightful ways.


Short clip from Hugo the Hippo

COMMENTS: We might adopt the lyrics from the opening Continue reading 281. HUGO THE HIPPO (1975) →

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CAPSULE: MY ENTIRE HIGH SCHOOL SINKING INTO THE SEA (2016)

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DIRECTED BY: Dash Shaw

FEATURING: Voices of , Reggie Watts, , Lena Dunham,

PLOT: An antisocial sophomore writer for the school newspaper becomes a hero when an earthquake causes (as the title suggests) his entire high school to sink into the sea.

Still from My Entire High School is Sinking into the Sea

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The central premise is more macabrely whimsical than surreal, and while the animation is out there, it’s not enough to advance this underground comic come to life to the grade of “weird.”

COMMENTS: An offbeat collision between “Daria” and The Poseidon Adventure, Dash Shaw’s My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea (adapted from his own comic) dips its toe into the waters of weirdness, but never wholly submerses itself. That’s fine, because it really isn’t aiming at all-out satire or savage surrealism. It’s content to be what it is: a quirky, amused, and almost-but-not-quite nostalgic look at horrors of high school cliquiness. Dash Shaw (yes, the protagonist is named after the writer) is a pretentious high school sophomore only recently recovered from a plague of freshman acne, with high hopes for the upcoming school year. He writes for the school paper and quarrels with his only friend, Assad, when the latter strikes up a romantic relationship with their editor, Verti, proving that just because you’re a nerd doesn’t mean you can’t also be a jerk. When an earthquake sends their precariously-perched school sinking into the sea, the three junior journalists team up with the sophomore class president and an ass-kicking lunch lady to save as many of their fellow students as possible.

Characterization, plot and comedy take a back seat to the visuals, which, while generally crude squigglevision-style inkings, are at the same time enormously inventive and constantly shifting so that the eye is never bored. Cut outs, silhouettes, and a yogic lung-cam are among the styles Shaw assays, along with undersea lava lamps and a psychedelic scene that features super-closeups on individual pixels. Among the visual gags are tributes to “Mortal Kombat” and “the Peanuts,” and Shaw gives even the “normal” scenes unreal color schemes to further liven things up.

Satirical highlights include a popular girl eaten by sharks and a senior football star who sets up his own fiefdom, but the plot is just a serviceable frame on which to hang the animation. As a comedy, it doesn’t produce a lot of laughs, but the gently snarky, tongue-in-cheek tone is pleasant. It comes close to earning a “recommended” tag, but while High School easily earns a passing grade—we’ll say a B+ average—it’s not graduating with honors. It’s a bit of a slacker, honestly, skating by on natural intelligence and outsider charm. It does earn a qualified recommendation for experimental animation fans, high school satire completists, and anyone looking for an amiable way to kill 90 minutes.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A super-fun, bananas-weird tale of thrilling heroics and life-defining friendships animated with collage, line art, paint, Sixties liquid-light effects, and realistic botanical and animal sketches.”–Ashley Moreno, Austin Chronicle (festival screening)

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CAPSULE: AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE COLON MOVIE FOR THEATERS (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Matt Maiellaro, Dave Willis

FEATURING: Voices of Carey Means, Dana Snyder, Dave Willis

PLOT: Animated TV characters based on fast food items (Frylock, Shake and Meatwad) accidentally assemble an apocalyptic exercise machine and discover their own origins.

Still from Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie for Theaters (2007)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Let’s face it: the Aqua Teens are lightweight, fast-food surrealism. We’re including this film mainly as a nod to the Cartoon Network’s influential “Adult Swim” programming, which brought a peculiar, hip-pop absurdism to the airwaves starting in 2001. Other, sometimes darker and weirder examples of this aesthetic are found in the work of awkward comedy duo and the standalone live-action experiments of and .

COMMENTS: “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” the TV show about animated fast food characters and their Italian-American stereotype neighbor interacting with 8-bit aliens from “Space Invaders,” has only been out of production for two years now, but it seems like something that should go into the “fondly remembered” bin. I think it’s because the show was so aggressively minor, going (often successfully) for the easy laugh, always settling for snark instead of satire, randomness instead of surrealism. It was the kind of thing that you used to catch flipping through channels at 1 AM, watch until the next commercial break, chuckle once or twice, then move on. Like any long-running series, however, it spawned a dedicated fan base, in this case one large enough to justify production of a widescreen movie “for theaters.”

Colon Movie doesn’t do much to orient newcomers to Aqua Teen‘s world—although to be fair, the series had little structure in the first place. There are three main characters: cool and competent Frylock, a flying pouch of french fries; Master Shake, an arrogant but stupid milkshake; and Meatwad, a wad of meat with low intellectual capacities but shapeshifting abilities. Their adventures are free-form, involving space travel, mad scientists, and other silliness. Colon Movie begins with a widely-praised prologue: a parody of the old “let’s go out to the lobby!” snack commercials with a heavy metal junk food band howling angry suggestions at viewers (“This is a copyrighted movie by Time Warner. If I find you selling it on E-Bay I will break into your house and tear your wife in half!”) We then begin the movie proper, which begins with a segment set in ancient Egypt, followed by a digression involving time-traveling Abe Lincoln. Yep, it’s sketch comedy a la an animated , with a stoner edge. The introductory tomfoolery fades out and the actual plot-based tomfoolery begins around the  fifteen-minute mark with the introduction of the doomsday exercise machine and the crudely-drawn aliens (and a mohawk-wearing time-traveling robot) tasked with saving humanity from the machine’s destructive power. This plotline goes on for some time until it’s replaced by our heroes’ encounter with one Dr. Weird and flashbacks to several conflicting, inconsistent origin stories for the Aqua Teens. Along the way they encounter a giant poodle, more aliens (including a watermelon alien teamed up with a shrunken Rush drummer Neil Peart), a Space Ghost cameo, and other sporadically entertaining nonsense. It’s all over in a brisk 80 minutes, although with only an hour or so of actual story it still seems a little bit padded. Still, fans anointed it awesome, although newcomers would probably be better served with a shorter form 11-minute episodes as an introduction to the Force (although, with the cancellation of the series in 2015, that format may be harder to access).

Ultimately, Colon Movie will probably be remembered most for a bit of trivia: as part of a guerilla marketing scheme, LED boards featuring the “Mooninite” aliens were placed in several cities, including Boston. Unfortunately, the advertising was enacted during a period of high tension in Beantown (there had been a bomb scare earlier that morning) and the signs were mistaken for improvised bombs. Despite widespread criticism of the Boston Police Department for overreacting to the incident, the Cartoon Network’s parent company Turner Broadcasting agreed to pay the city 2 million dollars to release them from any liability in the matter.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Like the ATHF television show, Colon Movie Film seemingly delights in making as little sense as possible. Its absurdist scenarios serve as little more than a ramshackle frame for bizarre non sequiturs, stoned pop-culture riffing, and some of the weirdest gags ever to make it into a studio-released film… roughly equivalent levels of tedium and hilarity.”–Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Caleb Moss [years before he became a contributor], who called it “unbelievably absurd, nihilistic, low budget animation filled with stony non-sequitors… I believe that it has weird potential all and all.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here).

Canonically Weird (The List)

279. THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF TOM THUMB (1993)

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“We have tried to create a kind of ‘nether world’ that would seem timeless. A strange place that would be uncomfortably familiar.”–Dave Borthwick

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DIRECTED BY: Dave Borthwick

FEATURING: Nick Upton, Deborah Collard

PLOT: When wasp-guts accidentally fall into a jar of artificial sperm, the resultant baby is a fetus-like boy about the size of a thumb. While Tom is still a pre-verbal toddler, men in black suits kidnap him from his poor but loving home and take him to their “Laboratorium” for study. Escaping with the help of a tiny dragon-like creature, Tom stumbles upon other miniature people, who live in a state of eternal war against the “giants,” before reuniting with his father.

Still from The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993)

BACKGROUND:

  • The movie’s plot is suggested by the fairy tale “Tom Thumb,” the oldest surviving English folktale, but beyond the presence of a tiny child there are few similarities to the ancient legend.
  • The movie was originally commissioned by the BBC as a ten-minute short to be shown at Christmastime, but they rejected the end product for being too dark. The station changed its mind after the short became an award-winning hit on the festival circuit, and co-funded this one-hour feature version of the story.
  • Tom Thumb was also partly funded by Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, who also wrote the theme song.
  • Besides stop-motion animation, Tom Thumb uses a technique called “pixilation,” which is basically the same idea but with live actors instead of models. Director Borthwick found that professional actors lacked the patience to sit still for the hours sometimes required for shots where humans interacted with puppets, so he used animators and technical personnel in the main roles instead (star Nick Upton is a primarily an animator specializing in pixilation).
  • After debuting on television, Tom Thumb toured the film festival circuit and even booked theatrical dates in the U.S., paired with the excellent and bizarre short “Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s so much to choose from—particularly the surrealistic menagerie of disembodied body parts and mix-and-match homunculi from the Laboratorium—that the wilder images cancel each other out. In fact, it’s the faces of our two leads—the innocent, half-formed clay features of Tom and the greasy, beaming mug of his proud working-class dad—that stick in the mind. Indeed, for the poster and DVD cover images, the producers used such of scene of the two principal characters posing together (it’s a promotional still of a domestic scene that does not actually occur in the movie).

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Flying syringe insect; crucified Santa; halo of vermin

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The tone of this fairy tale is hard to explain: equal parts silent slapstick, dystopian futurism, and ian surrealism, delivered through twitchy visuals that makes it play like a particularly restless dream. There is an unexpected sweetness to the concoction that helps it go down more smoothly than you might expect, but it still leaves a residue of nightmare behind.


Original trailer for The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb

COMMENTS:The had been producing surreal, Continue reading 279. THE SECRET ADVENTURES OF TOM THUMB (1993) →