Turkeys, clams and seashells twerk, watched by buff men with giant eyes in their chest.
All posts by Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies)
SATURDAY SHORT: METROPOLIS UNRESTORED (2024)
Metropolis , as it was never meant to be seen. (A segment from a longer 15-director anthology remix film).
60*. RAGGEDY ANN & ANDY: A MUSICAL ADVENTURE (1977)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
“This is really weird.”–Raggedy Andy, when a camel asks him to climb on and join him as he chases an invisible caravan in the sky
DIRECTED BY: Richard Williams
FEATURING: Claire Williams, voices of Didi Conn, Mark Baker, Fred Stuthman, Niki Flacks, George S. Irving, Marty Brill, Joe Silver, Alan Sues
PLOT: On her owner’s birthday, Raggedy Ann and her brother Andy meet Babette, a snobbish new doll from France. Babette is quickly abducted by snowglobe pirate Captain Contagious. Ann and Andy venture out into the night, where they encounter a camel, a taffy pit, and an inflatable Loony king, before finally confronting the pirate ship.
BACKGROUND:
- Raggedy Ann began her life as a mass-produced rag doll in 1915. A series of children’s books based on the character followed in the 1920s, continuing until the 1970s. Fleischer Brothers studios made three animated Raggedy Ann and Andy shorts in the 1940s. The dolls are still produced today.
- This feature film was loosely adapted from the 1924 children’s book “Raggedy Ann and Andy and the Camel with the Wrinkled Knees.“
- Director Richard Williams took over for originally-slated director Abe Levitow, who died before production began.
- The adaptation was originally conceived as a Broadway musical, then a TV special, before becoming a feature film. An actual Broadway musical with many of the same characters (but a different plot) followed in 1986.
- The film ended up costing more than double its original budget, and was a box office failure. It was released on VHS, but has never officially been released on DVD or Blu-ray.
- Voted onto the Apocrypha by readers in this poll.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The Greedy, an inexplicable being who inhabits the Taffy Pit and exists as a sort of candy-themed, eternally mutating Lovecraftian horror-cum-cupcake.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Ghost camel caravan in the sky; expanding looney king
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Raggedy Ann was a hobo doll, the cheapest and most unassuming children’s toy imaginable. Throwing this plain Jane toy into a backyard “Alice in Wonderland” scenario shouldn’t have produced results as odd as it did. A Musical Adventure is uneven, but in its insaner moments, it genuinely goes for broke.
Original trailer for Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977)
COMMENTS: “Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all Continue reading 60*. RAGGEDY ANN & ANDY: A MUSICAL ADVENTURE (1977)
SATURDAY SHORT: I AM YOUR GRANDMA (2011)
A woman records a message for her as-yet-unborn grandchild.
CAPSULE: KRYPTIC (2024)
366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.
Kryptic is currently available on VOD for purchase or rental.
DIRECTED BY: Kourtney Roy
FEATURING: Chloe Pirrie, Jeff Gladstone
PLOT: Cryptozoology fan Kay catches a glimpse of a monster in the Canadian woods, sparking an identity crisis.
COMMENTS: I think it’s no real mystery why Kryptic fails. It’s not the fault of lead Chloe Pirrie, cinematographer David Bird, or anyone on the visual effects team. The movie is competently shot and acted; it’s a professionally assembled low-to-mid-budget genre film. There is a memorable recurring scene of, shall we say, crytpid gooeyness, and a couple of cool quick-flash shots suggesting hallucinations or buried realities: a face that suddenly takes on a demonic sheen; hands whose fingers, on second glance, appear inhumanly long. All this suggests talent on hand. And the issue isn’t really that the movie is too weird, confusing, or inconclusive, although Kryptic has more than enough strangeness to frustrate the mainstream viewer. But when it works, it works, despite the ellipticality. No, the problem clearly lies with the screenplay.
The first thirty minutes or so, which set up the premise, are perfectly fine. Kay catches the merest glimpse of a cryptid in the woods while on an (all-female) tour hosted by a Jon Lovitz impersonator; this results in near-total amnesia. While putting together the pieces of her life from clues lying around her unfamiliar car and home, she discovers a news story about a woman named Barb Valentine, a cryptozoologist who recently disappeared—and who looks exactly like Kay. It’s a promisingly mysterious beginning, even if there is nothing especially eye-catching (the second-long encounter with the creature is even less illuminating than the Patterson-Gimlin film).
The last twenty minutes or so are also not really the problem. Some will complain that the final events explain too little, but there is at least a legitimately Lynchian flavor to the proceedings. Most importantly, while the events of the finale are still confusing, they are at least confusing in an interesting way.
No, the problem with Kryptic is clearly its long, meandering second act. Kay follows “clues” which lead her from one mildly quirky but scarcely interesting character (nearly all of them women) to another: a hotel owner, a fellow cryptid enthusiast, a magician in a bar, a trailer park family. None of these encounters make much of an impression or provide much of a clue as to where the story is eventually heading. The only meaningful developments in the entire section occur in our heroine’s head. She starts increasingly pretending to be Barb rather than Kay—or maybe she thinks she is becoming Barb? Meanwhile, she has a lot of flashbacks (or maybe flashforwards) to the aforementioned sticky fantasy involving the cryptid, usually sparked by some observation of sex. Kryptic is not up to the challenge it sets itself of illustrating that interior character arc. The encounters that make up the bulk of the movie act are inevitably dry conversations that could be fast-forwarded through without losing much of value. It seems that the script just did not have enough decent ideas for a full 90 minutes; and yet, the movie runs 102 minutes, and feels even longer. This suggests some basic advice for new directors: when padding a film, add only the minimum amount of scenes necessary to reach feature length.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: