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: THE BIRDS (1963)

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Must See

DIRECTED BY: Alfred Hitchcock

FEATURING: , Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, , Veronica Cartwright

PLOT: Without explanation, birds begin attacking the quiet seaside town of Bogeda Bay, interrupting a burgeoning love affair between a socialite and a lawyer.

Still from The Birds (1963)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: A great movie, but only the raw inexplicability of the avian attacks makes this Hitchcock worthy of any particular weird notice.

COMMENTS: The crow has long been an omen of death, but never have our fine feathered friends been so conspicuously thantatotic as in Alfred Hitchcock’s first true horror (as opposed to suspense) film. Hitch’s typical plotting trick—beginning with one situation, then springing a twist in the movie’s first half that makes the opening irrelevant—has never worked as well thematically as it does here. Melanie and Mitch’s coy flirtations, cultured as they may be, are rendered ridiculous midway through the film in light of the raw realities of the assault from above. And yet, by the time the first wave of pecking finches swoop through the chimney, we’re invested in the pair. The birds—natural, inexorable, and inexplicable, brooding on their makeshift roosts—are the perfect images of death, looming for all of us. Thoughts of romance may occupy the early reels, but as the story moves on, the birds’ inevitable victory over our heroes becomes clear, and the tale turns to the desperate, if doomed, fight for survival.

Incredibly, you will sometimes hear people complain that the movie is flawed because it does not explain why the birds are attacking. Providing an explanation would have turned The Birds into the silliest type of B-movie fare. How unsatisfying would it be if  it turned out the birds had gone mad from drinking water contaminated with waste from an experimental nuclear reactor? The heart of The Birds‘ horror is the incomprehensibility of the attack, which reflects the incomprehensibility of our own mortality. The inconclusiveness of the scene in the restaurant where the townsfolk debate the cause of the catastrophe is the centerpiece of the film, dramatizing the residents’ utter failure to come to grips with the situation and the futility of their plight. One citizen theorizes that, unmotivated, the birds have suddenly declared war on humanity; a scientist absurdly spends her time explaining why what is happening can’t be happening; the crazy old coot in the corner warns that it’s the end of the world. (That last guess is probably the closest to being correct, though there’s no Biblical element to the story).

One woman assumes that, because there were no bird attacks before Melanie came to town, the disaster is the interloper’s fault. Perhaps; Melanie’s reaction (slapping the woman) suggests guilt. Melanie’s arrival stirs the Freudian pot between Mitch and his widowed mother, and brings schoolteacher Annie’s buried feelings back to the surface—she’s a destabilizing sexual force. (Curious that almost all the major roles in the film go to females, with Mitch alone at the center of a web of women). Besides those psychological teases, there’s also an inevitable Cold War subtext the film. When the birds strike and the family is holed up in their homes, seeking any news of the disaster on the radio, it surely must have struck a cord with American audiences still on edge from 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis. The chilling final shot of a bird-strewn pre-dawn landscape is like a post-apocalyptic world covered in feathered fallout.

Universal’s 2014 Blu-ray release is essentially the single disc version of The Birds disc from the “Alfred Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection” 15-disc box set. It’s packed with extra features too numerous to list here; there are actually more minutes devoted to the bonuses than to the two-hour movie itself. Hitch’s blackly ironic trailer where he “lectures” on humanity’s historical relations with his fine feathered friends is typically droll and brilliant.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Few films depict so eerily yet so meticulously the metaphysical and historical sense of a world out of joint.”–Richard Brody, The New Yorker

366 Exclusive

THE WALLACE SHAWN INTERVIEW

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You might know from 1981’s My Dinner with Andre, which he wrote and starred in, from his small but memorable role in The Princess Bride, or as the voice of Rex the Dinosaur in the Toy Story series. I spoke to the actor and playwright by phone on the morning of May 16th; mustering all the restraint I could manage, I decided not to title the resulting discussion some variation of “My ___ with Wally.” After a bit of edited-out introductory fumbling around on my part, we got down to conversational business.

366 Weird Movies: You’re here today primarily to talk about Don Peyote. There are a lot of interesting cameos in Don Peyote: Anne Hathaway, most notably, but also cult figures like , the director Abel Ferrara, and yourself. How did you come to be involved in this project?

Wallace Shawn: I don’t know. Somebody called me, and I… you’ve read about Pavlov’s experiments? When certain bells are rung, the dog begins to salivate. In my case, I ran out the door and joined this rather eccentric collection of people for a day.

Wallace Shawn in Don Peyote
Wallace Shawn as Dr. Fieldman in the psychedelic comedy “DON PEYOTE” an XLrator Media release. Photography credit: Isak Tiner.

366: I imagine you didn’t get to interact with a lot of the cast; your scene was just with Dan Fogler, I believe.

WS: This was a very improvisational movie, and there were all sorts of other things that went on.

366: Were there scenes that didn’t make it in that you shot?

WS: Sadly, there were even scenes that didn’t make it in. Because the whole movie was made in a rather improvisational way, and different things were probably… I don’t think it was just me… they probably had five hours, if they put everything in. It would be a five hour movie—I don’t know, I’m speculating. But they obviously had to make some tough decisions in there. Each of the little interviews with the people that are in the documentary, they’re fragments, obviously, from longer conversations.

366: I’m guessing from the title alone that you realized this was going to be a drug movie, which doesn’t seem like the sort of movie you’ve done before. What’s your view on drugs, or the movie’s take on the psychedelic experience?

WS: The movie’s take, if I were to decipher it: I would say on the one hand the whole style of the film is, let’s say, a very “druggy” style. So, someone who had never taken any drugs might never have been able to make such a film, and might not have been interested in making such a film. There’s an implied criticism of excessive drug taking in it, because they’re not really up to the task of making the documentary that they dream of, and certainly Dan’s character is unable to enjoy his relationship with the very nice fiancee. So, in a sense the movie shows some of the negative sides of taking too many drugs.

My own view, obviously coming as I do out of the 1960s, I know that a lot of people have learned a lot from taking drugs, and expanded their consciousness. On the other hand many people have been destroyed by taking drugs, particularly in excess.

366: I don’t want you to incriminate yourself about any of your own drug use in the past, potentially, but were you involved in the counterculture movement in the Sixties, or did you consider yourself to be part of that movement?

WS: I tragically missed all of it, because I was too fearful. And I regret that, tremendously. I was afraid of everything at that time. I’ve become slightly more youthful in my older years, but it’s too late. Those decades are over and that counterculture period is over.

366: I saw you do another interview where you talked about being fearful in your youth, and it seems strange that you would then get into a vocation like acting, where you have to be very outgoing. So how did that come about?

WS: Well, I started as a writer, and I got into acting almost completely by accident. And I was changing by that time. I was about 35 years old when I had my first acting job. And by then, I was already becoming less fearful.

366: You are in another movie right now, The Double, with Jesse Eisenberg. I haven’t seen it yet, but based on the trailer you seem to have a very prominent part in that one. What’s your role in that?

WS: In that one I play the boss of the office where the “first” Jesse Eisenberg works as a miserable underling, and I barely can recognize him. And then the “second” Jesse Eisenberg comes along and he’s very smooth and suave and I absolutely am crazy about him and promote him and have the deepest respect for him. It’s a very, very fascinating film, based on Dostoevsky.

366: Do you have any other projects coming out soon that we might look out for?

WS: Yes, I am going to be in a movie called A Master Builder that Jonathan Demme has directed. It’s based on a play of Ibsen that Andre Gregory has been working on as the director since 1997. I have an incredible part in it, I translated and adapted the Ibsen play and I play the main part, I have to say. It’s a very remarkable film.

366: Is that coming out in 2014?

WS: It’s opening in July in New York.

366: I want to thank you very much for talking with us, and good luck with all your endeavors.

WS: Okay, it’s great to talk to you.

 

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS (1967)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Alain Robbe-Grillet

PLOT: A director (played by Robbe-Grillet himself) pitches a complicated story about a cocaine smuggling caper to a producer during a train ride, and the audience watches the results play out, revisions and all.

Still from Trans-Europ-Express (1967)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The second film from novelist-turned-director Alain Robbe-Grillet is a pioneering work of cinematic meta-fiction that prefigures the work of (among others) by putting a fictional author inside of the movie, one who supposedly writes the script in real time as we watch. Sometimes the story backtracks on itself, erasing old plot points or creating alternative scenarios. To make things even stranger, the protagonist of the movie-inside-the-movie is obsessed with bondage, and begins a relationship with an elegant prostitute who may help him fulfill his most excessive fantasies.

COMMENTS: Sitting on the Trans-Europ-Express from Paris to Antwerp, a director tells his producer that they should set a movie on this train; they decide it should be about drug smuggling. A man, who we’ve previously seen buying a suitcase to smuggle cocaine, walks into their compartment. The producer and director are invisible to him; he only sees the script girl. When he leaves almost immediately, the director comments “is he crazy?” “Didn’t you recognize him?,” asks the producer. “It’s Trintignant. What about using him in your film?” They then do proceed to use Trintigant in their film treatment. The story they concoct on the fly sends him to an Antwerp where everyone is either an operative working for the local cartel or a detective, and where he is sent on an increasingly Byzantine series of rendezvous to prove his worth and to obscure his tracks. Along the way he begins a relationship with the prostitute Eva, with whom he indulges his strangling fetish. After a series of double crosses and betrayals which are nearly impossible to sort out, because the director keeps rewriting the script, it all ends in tragedy at “Eve’s Witchcraft Cabaret,” a bondage-themed club with a naked girl chained to a rotating stage.

Despite the dark themes, Trans-Europ-Express is actually a comedy, though in a high-minded, very French way—more “witty” than “funny.” The movie’s abstract, Cubist twists on gangster scenarios recall ‘s crazy yakuza film Branded to Kill, also from 1967. Although it deconstructs the conventions of a genre picture in similar fashion to ‘s 1960 Breathless, the light touch and playfulness keeps Express from feeling as ponderous and self-important as the works of some of Robbe-Grillet’s New Wave contemporaries. At the same time, the movie’s perverse sexuality, related to the subconscious desires of Surrealism, ventures further into the forbidden than his contemporaries dared. Express‘ scenes of sexual strangulation, implied rape and even nudity were considered pretty hot stuff at the time, although they will look tame through jaded modern eyes.

Robbe-Grillet began his career as an experimental novelist, helping to found the avant-garde “nouvelle roman” genre. He turned to cinema after co-writing the script for Last Year at Marienbad with . Trans-Europ-Express was his second film as director. The Kino sub-label Redemption began releasing Robbe-Grillet’s neglected films, some of which have never been on DVD before, in 2014.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The result is both a pure example of narrative deconstruction – with some genuinely absurd moments – and a pretty weird experience for the viewer…”–Johnathan Dawson, Senses of Cinema

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CAPSULE: THE ROOM (2003)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Tommy Wiseau, Juliette Danielle,

PLOT: A trusting banker’s fiancée cheats on him with his best friend.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Room is certainly… um, unusual (actually, more like delusional). While it’s a qualified “must-see” for seekers of the offbeat, it’s more on-the-surface-stupid than deeply, derangedly weird.

Still from The Room (2003)
COMMENTS: When The Room begins it seems like a normal movie. There is a professional-looking spinning “W” logo for Wiseau-Films, competent establishing shots of the Golden Gate bridge and other Frisco landmarks, and an overture that is not conspicuously awful. Then, in the very first scene Tommy Wiseau strides through the door with his long, stringy black hair framing a face that looks like a cadaver shot up with Botox. “Hai babe,” he says in an unplaceable, lilting mutt-Eurotrash accent that seems vaguely French, vaguely Polish. “I haf sumfink for yoo-ooo.” What follows is a soapy melodrama in which universally-beloved paragon-of-benevolence Johnny (Wiseau) is relentlessly betrayed by manipulative, ungrateful fiancée Lisa. That may seem like a pretty slender storyline to try to hang a ninety-minute feature on, and it is. Wiseau the writer is aware of this fact, and so he stuffs the script full of subplots (not to mention three gauzy slow-jam sex scenes in the first half hour alone, complete with a tasteful shot of Wiseau’s bum for the ladies). Lisa’s mother has breast cancer. Lisa accuses Johnny of beating her. Denny, a teenage orphan Johnny is putting through college, has the hots for Lisa. A couple of friends of the unhappy couple break into their apartment to make out, and are discovered by Lisa and her mother. Denny owes money to a drug dealer named Chris-R. Johnny and his friends put on tuxedos and throw around the football until one of them trips and they call the game off. Lisa lies about being pregnant. The problem with these subplots is that they almost all exist only within the scene their introduced in, and are either completely forgotten or never affect the story in any significant way again.

Still, all of this nonsensicality would have resulted in a forgettably awful movie if not for the odd screen presence of Wiseau, whose incongruous anti-charisma adds a layer of perverse fascination. Wiseau looks two decades older than the twenty-something actors who are supposed to be his friends and contemporaries. His miscellaneous accent and his inability to keep his eyes open past half mast already mark him as an odd leading man, but he is also one of the single worst thespians ever to appear onscreen. While the rest of the cast shows soap opera-level acting skills most of the time—except when whipped into histrionics by the discovery that Denny is involved with drugs—Wiseau struggles to match his facial expression and tone of voice to the situation at hand. He laughs at tragic stories, and barely shows any emotion when he’s fuming mad. When he does manage to overreact—as in his infamous “Lisa, you’re tearing me apart!” line—it’s actually surprising that he has somehow nailed the correct emotion, even if he’s failed to convey it believably.

Wiseau scripted himself as a character with no flaws, except for loving too much. The story is obviously based on post-breakup delusions of victimhood, combined with “she’d be sorry if…” passive/aggressive fantasies. Although I hate to play amateur psychologist, Wiseau appears to suffer from a benign form of narcissistic personality disorder, combined with a touch of high-functioning autism. He portrays himself as a lovable victim, but watching The Room, I only felt embarrassed on his behalf (that is, when not breaking up in peals of laughter at his unintentionally inappropriate reactions). Wiseau’s cluelessness seems sad to me, not endearing like lovable naive auteur like . Perhaps this is merely because Wiseau is still with us, and I’ll be fonder of him once he’s passed on.

Co-star Juliette Danielle was only twenty years old and almost literally right off the bus from Texas when she was cast as Wiseau’s conniving love interest. Wide-eyed and excited to be making a movie, the young girl was so humiliated after the film’s disastrous debut and the subsequent jokes made at her expense that she not only retired from acting, but virtually went into hiding for nine years (she’s only recently emerged as a stand-up comic and actress, finally embracing her notoriety). Making a bad movie is all fun and games, until somebody’s career gets ruined.

On a happier note, co-star Greg Sestero wrote a memoir describing the making of The Room and his relationship with Wiseau (much of whose past, including his nationality and the source of the six million dollars he allegedly spent from his own pocket to produce his trashterpiece, remain cloaked in mystery). Rights to the book, “The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made,” have been purchased by a Hollywood group that includes comedian Seth Rogen and 2014 Weirdcademy Award winner James Franco (who may play Wiseau in the film adaptation).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[Wiseau is] a narcissist nonpareil whose movie makes Vincent Gallo’s ‘The Brown Bunny’ seem the apotheosis of cinematic self-restraint.”–Scott Foundas, Variety (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by BLAMbert, who rhapsodized that it was “a disastrous train wreck combining a boring story, ridiculous sets, terrible performances, gratuitous sex scenes, unlikable characters, unresolved subplots, and generally incompetent film-making into a confounding and gooey glob of strange.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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CAPSULE: NIGHTDREAMS (1981)

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DIRECTED BY: F.X. Pope

FEATURING: Dorothy LeMay, Jennifer West, Andy Nichols

PLOT: Two scientists observe a woman’s erotic dreams.

Still from Nightdreams (1981)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: As the first, and very nearly the only, movie to mix hardcore XXX action with dream logic, Nightdreams is a unique beast. As a curiosity piece it’s something to add to your bucket list, but once the novelty of surrealist porn wears off, Nightdreams is not really a great movie—and it’s worse erotica.

COMMENTS: There’s a reason plotted porn movies never took off. Narrative and intense titillation work against each other; each one is a distraction from the other. Even today, directors like who toy with adding explicit sex to their movies make sure that actual acts of penetration and gynecological detail last only for a few seconds, to keep their stories from drifting into a fap-fest. Surrealism and porn don’t really go well together, either; the weird feeling inspired when a cigarette-smoking fish head pops up in bed next to a lovely lady throws cold water on those sexytime cravings. Written by a young “Hustler” copy writer named Jerry Stahl and that magazine’s “Creative Director” (the two would continue their partnership on the XXX cult film Cafe Flesh and the softcore midnight movie Dr. Caligari), Nightdreams was made by smart people slumming in the gutter, anxious to do something erotically different for two reasons: a), to get themselves noticed, and b) to keep from getting bored in the repetitive and formulaic world of porno. Of course, porn is repetitive and formulaic for a reason—its function is to expand viewers’ pants, not their intellectual horizons—so, while Nightdreams got some favorable notice as some sort of prestige sleaze piece, it didn’t exactly found a subgenre of art-house smut.

Nightdreams stars Dorothy LeMay as the woman whose sexual imagination is so outlandish it’s the subject of a research project by a pair of scientists in lab coats. Strawberry blond LeMay has a real-world, girl-next-door sexiness that’s refreshing compared to the plasticized glamor of today’s porn starlets, but, based on her line readings, an actress she is not. That’s okay, because she appears to enjoy the weird sex (so maybe she is a great actress, after all). Her fantasies involve sex with a Jack-in-the-box (accompanied by creepy anti-erotic laughter), a campfire threesome with two lithe cowgirls (while Wall of Voodoo sings a cool New Wave rendition of “Ring of Fire”), servicing a couple of hookah-smoking sheiks, meeting a man with a fetus in his pants, a pseudo-rape scene over a toilet, and rutting with the Devil in Hell, followed by a romantic coupling with an angelic stud in Paradise. The movie’s most memorable sequence, no doubt, is when Dorothy fellates a living rendition of a Cream of Wheat box while serenaded by a jazz version of “Old Man River.” Her head bobs back and forth to the music, and a piece of toast shows up to accompany the couple on sax. It’s an unusual sight, to say the least. Like most of Nightdreams‘ scenes, it’s too weird to be erotic, but too porn-y to work as an art installation.

The Cream of Wheat scene is a trademark infringement that the Nabisco company would never condone, and I seriously doubt Johnny Cash would license the rights to “Ring of Fire” for a lesbian threesome scene, either. I suspect Nightdreams got away with these infringements because, in 1981, porn was still relatively taboo, and none of the copyright holders would admit to having seen the film.

The IMDB credits “F.X. Pope”  as Nightdreams‘ director, and lists this as an alias for TV and music video director Francis Delia (who has no other porn connections). However, IMDB also lists “F.X. Pope” as one of Sayadian’s pseudonyms—I had always assumed Sayadian was the director because of the style, and also because he indisputably directed the sequel Nightdreams 2.

Others who worked on Nightdreams include Fast Steppin’ Freddie, Zoot Suit and Pez D. Spencer.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…definitely the most unusual and unique porn flick I’ve ever seen… a series of weird, funny, sexy, surreal and twisted dreams.”–Goregirl, Goregirl’s Dungeon (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Andrew.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)