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.
Top 10 Lists

TOP 10 WEIRDEST MOVIES OF 2013

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Still from John Dies at the EndThe air is crisp, and your breath hangs in front of you in clouds. Or, if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, the air is balmy, and sweat drips into your eyes. You’re wondering whether you still have that herbal hangover remedy recipe that you used last year (was it ginseng and ma huang, or gingko and milk thistle?) You’re trying to remember the words to “Auld Lang Syne” and deciding precisely which acquaintances you’ll be forgetting in the upcoming year. And you’re rushing to the Internet to see what the experts have declared to be the ten blankiest blanks of the annum just past.

Yes, it’s that season again, the time critics look forward to all year—time to grind out another year’s end best of list to fill up a few inches of real estate on your readers’ web browsers . In weird movie terms, 2013 was a very mixed year. On the one hand, there’s no obvious consensus weird classic (like 2012’s Holy Motors) jumping out at you from this year’s lineup. But what 2013 lacked in depth it made up in breadth. We weren’t scraping to come up with ten truly weird contestants this year; instead, we were reluctantly leaving off stuff like the juvenile-delinquents-from-outer-space musical The Ghastly Love of Johnny X, which would have been a shoo-in in 2012. This year the movies at the bottom of our rankings give the ones at the top a run for their money. It may ultimately be quantity over quality, but it did make it easier to pick out something challenging from the “new releases” section to watch on a Saturday night, which makes 2013 a successful year in our book. So now, in random order—the weirdest of orders—here’s our survey of the strangest of the strange from the past year.

4. Upstream Color: A Thief infects a woman with a will-sapping worm and empties her bank account; she’s eventually psychically linked to a pig, but fortunately meets a man whose gone through the same experience. Their pigs also fall in love. Solving the question of what literally happens in Upstream Color is only the beginning of the riddle of ‘s bewildering followup to his confusing but logically rigorous time travel film Primer.

8. Antiviral: This queasy mixture of satire and body horror starts from the premise that in the future, people will pay good money to become infected with viruses that have recently been coursing through the bloodstream of their favorite celebrities. Director promises to carry on the disreputable work of his sire, .

10. The ABCs of Death: Averaging four-and-a-half minutes per letter of the alphabet, this twenty-six short film primer on death contains three extremely weird entries (two of them from Japan, natch), along with a host of blander moments. Uneven by nature, with lots of senseless gore and “toilet horror,” but watch for the deadly masturbation contests, Nazi furries, zombie clowns, and the Asian Dr. Strangelove. ‘s “F is for Fart” is an apocalypse of bad taste guaranteed to have the average viewer scurrying for the exit, hitting the eject button, or aborting the download (check all that apply).

1. John Dies at the End: Two slackers take the drug “Soy Sauce” which allows them to see an upcoming invasion by inter-dimensional cockroaches and eventually travel to an alternate universe to save the world. John dies, or does he? Many fans of the witty original novel hated this adaptation; fortunately for us, we don’t read books, and so we loved every confusing-as-hell minute of this messed-up mish-mashterpiece of a movie.

6. The Rambler: Absurdly cool Dermot Mulroney keeps his shades and cowboy hat on at all times as he rambles through a weird West full of Continue reading TOP 10 WEIRDEST MOVIES OF 2013 →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: RUSSIAN ARK (2002)

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DIRECTED BY: Aleksandr Sokurov

FEATURING: Sergey Dreyden, Aleksandr Sokurov

PLOT: In one take, a ghostlike figure wanders through the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, watching re-enactments of Russian history and debating art and culture with a French aristocrat.

Still from Russian Ark (2002)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: As the longest unbroken take in the history of cinema, Russian Ark is somewhat experimental in form, and with its intermingling of various eras of Russian history inside the Hermitage museum, it is somewhat surreal in content. Viewed simply as tour de force filmmaking, it’s worth seeing for the curious and cultured, and a must-see for film school types. The film’s only drawback is that its high art, highly Russophilic preoccupations make it unavoidably stuffy at times, and risk limiting its appeal to the tea-and-crumpets (er, samovar-and-beluga?) crowd.

COMMENTS: Who is the main character of Russian Ark? Ghost? Amnesiac time traveler? Dreamer? Or just a metaphorical representative of the Russian spirit? The speaker through whose eyes we watch Russian Ark remembers some vague accident, but opens his eyes to see women in furs and feathered headdresses emerging from a carriage; accompanied by men in formal scarlet military uniforms, he judges their fashions to be from the 1800s. He’s swept along with the guests from a snowy courtyard through a wooden door; he eventually deduces he is the Winter Palace section of the Hermitage, the ancient home of the Czars that was turned into the world’s largest art museum. No can see or hear him until he encounters an older man in black, who is equally lost in time and space; this is the Marquis, who will be his companion through the rest of his odyssey through the Hermitage.

That journey involves the pair passing through the various rooms of the museum, some of which are occupied by today’s art patrons, and some by ghosts from prior ages, including Peter the Great, Anastasia, and Catherine the Great (who is looking for a chamberpot). Curiously, there is little focus on the individual works of art; the camera rarely gives the paintings and statuary more than a passing glance, instead maintaining a constant wide-angle view of each sprawling, packed chamber. We watch courtly episodes from history and eavesdrop on some conversations, but the meat of the movie are the conversations between the European Marquis and the modern Russian through whose eyes we see the museum. Some of their dialogue is absurd, but much of it is self-reflective hand-wringing over the state of Russian culture. Russians come off as having a bit of an inferiority complex towards Europe. The Marquis sneers that Russians are great copyists in the fine arts, but produce nothing original; all the great works in the museum come from the French, the Italians, or others. He is disdainful towards the Russian people, yet he is slowly won over by the final scene, a massive Czarist ball where he joins in a mazurka with the ghosts of past maidens. Overcome with nostalgia for the lovely aristocratic past, the Marquis decides to stay behind at the phantasmagorical ballet. His decision validates the Ark’s role in preserving Western culture, but the Russian chooses to go on without him, headed towards an unknown destiny. Although we get a few clues as to the man behind the point-of-view’s identity, it isn’t really important. Russian Ark‘s main character is actually the Hermitage.

Russian Ark was shot in a single 87-minute take with a digital camera that followed the characters through thirty-three rooms of the Winter Palace. The cast included over 2,000 extras, and a full orchestra, all of whom had to be costumed and choreographed. Rehearsals lasted for months before the shot was attempted. Depending on which source you believe, the take was flawlessly executed on either the third or the fourth attempt. (To make things slightly easier, the sound was recorded later). Only one day was allocated to actual filming.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If cinema is sometimes dreamlike, then every edit is an awakening. ‘Russian Ark’ spins a daydream made of centuries.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Jenn, who insightfully suggested that it was “perhaps artsy instead of weird” but added “[i]t is super pretty and certainly unusual and dreamy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Jameson Parker, Lisa Blount, , Victor Wong

PLOT: A priest discovers the essence of evil buried in a vault underneath a Los Angeles church, and a team of professors and grad students set out to study it.

Still from Prince of Darkness (1987)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: If you laid out all the world’s horror movies on a spectrum from utterly surreal to mundane, Prince of Darkness would just barely lie on the strange side of the weird meridian.

COMMENTS: Like a lot of John Carpenter’s later horror movies, Prince of Darkness frequently weaves back and forth across the thin line that separates intriguing from goofy. On the one hand, the idea that quantum physics might take the place of nuclear power as the horror movies’ go-to source of scientific anxiety is exciting. (Other than the rare ambitious item like Crowley/Chemical Wedding, horror hasn’t followed Carpenter’s lead here, preferring genetics as more populist technological boogeyman). At the subatomic level, argues Prince of Darkness‘ sage, Professor Birack, rationality breaks down and the everyday rules of logic don’t apply. Playing off people’s discomfort with physicists’ unnerving message that the foundations of matter and reality are wispy and indeterminate, the script argues that Satan might be hiding out at the subatomic level.

That’s a clever inspiration for a horror film, so it’s a little disappointing to see such notions translate into Lucifer as a glob of glowing green goo trapped in a centrifuge in the Church basement. Recasting the Book of Revelation in science-fictiony terms, Jesus becomes a good alien speaking to the prophets in code to help us ward off future attacks by bad aliens—or something like that. At one point, the computer monitor warns one of the investigating grad students, “You will not be saved by the god Plutonium.”

Actually, if Prince of Darkness had contained more of that type of oracular craziness, it might have passed muster as a campy classic. Instead, the movie mostly abandons the religio-scientific mumbo-jumbo for its second half and ventures into a standard people-trapped-in-a-building-fighting-zombies scenario. The Evil Presence, whatever it is, doesn’t play by constant rules. Sometimes, it possesses people at a distance to do its bidding, as with the homeless people it enslaves and uses to encircle the church. At other times it has to infect hosts by spitting a stream of fluid directly into their mouths, and at yet other moments it kills someone first, then reanimates him to do its bidding. The choice of which method it uses all comes down to whatever most conveniently leads into the next big kill or grossout scene (although the Evil seems to prefer killing males and possessing females via fluid transfer, it’s not a stickler about it). The second half of the movie becomes a formula exercise in winnowing down the cast, as grad students are gradually sacrificed to the growing evil. Still, a few oddball moments poke through the familiar fabric (i.e. Victor Wong fighting grad-student zombies with a shaken-up Sprite and a chopstick, and a “this is not a dream” dream sequence that’s one of the movie’s better ideas), making Prince a confounding glimpse at a great weird movie that could have been.

Shout! Factory’s Blu-ray “Collectors Edition” of Prince of Darkness makes Universal’s old bare bones DVD edition obsolete (unless you don’t own a Blu player, as Shout! hasn’t released this version on the older format). It includes a commentary by Carpenter, an alternate opening shot for television, and several interviews (including one with rocker Alice Cooper, whose role in the film is little more than that of an extra with lots of screen time).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 “…an endearingly odd, consistently creepy film… met on its own bonkers terms, Prince Of Darkness proves satisfying.”–Keith Phipps, The Dissolve (Blu-ray)

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Miscellanea

17TH ANNUAL ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY AWARDS (WITH OUR VOTES AND COMMENTS)

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From the Online Film Critics Society press release: “The Online Film Critics Society proudly announces the recipients of the 17th annual OFCS awards for excellence in film. Steven McQueen’s ’12 Years a Slave’ was the standout winner, with recognitions for Best Picture, Best Actor (Chiwetel Ejiofor), Best Supporting Actor (Michael Fassbender), Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o), and Best Adapted Screenplay, for John Ridley’s hand in bringing Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir to the big screen.”

Normally, the OFCS results are not predictors of the Academy Awards, but this year I would expect 12 Years a Slave to dominate the awards circuit.

Sadly, there were very few viable award candidates this year from the weird genre. In 2011, my first year of voting, there was The Tree of Life; in 2012 Holy Motors was a contender. In 2010, the year before I joined, there was Black Swan and Dogtooth. This year, only conventional films were nominated, and frankly the experimental filmmakers did not do a good enough job to deserve nominations. I thought that  might have snuck in some nominations for Spring Breakers: James Franco definitely could have shown up among the best supporting actors, and technical awards for cinematography or editing would not have been out of the question. Not even dying could get noticed for Night Across the Street, nor could break free from the shortlist in the Best Actress category for Upstream Color. I didn’t press for John Dies at the End or Strange Frame: Love & Sax, which are good cult movies but peculiar things not likely to impress the mainstream. Even sometimes weird directors like the Coen Brothers and chose to play it safe with their offerings this year; so, we were left with a rather boring slate of dramatic realism to chose from in 2013. That being said, I’m more upset about weird filmmakers failure to come up with anything worth nominating than I am with my fellow critics’ failure to nominate anything weird.

As always, I take my voting responsibility very seriously. Here is the list of winners along with my choices and a touch of personal commentary.

BEST PICTURE

Winner: 12 Years a Slave

Also Nominated: American Hustle, Before Midnight, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Drug War, Gravity, Her, Inside Llewyn Davis, Short Term 12, The Wind Rises

G. Smalley’s Vote: Gravity

Comments: It was absolutely predictable that 12 Years a Slave would win Best Picture. It’s beautifully made. It’s a historical drama, the prestige  genre. It’s full of outrages, without being the slightest bit controversial. What is perhaps more surprising than the success of 12 Years is the fact that there have been so few movies made about American slavery (compared to, say, the glut of films made about the equally dramatic subject of the Holocaust). The most important previous film depiction of the life of a plantation slave was the excellent 1977 TV miniseries “Roots.” 12 Years had the freedom to be much more brutal, and much more explicit about the sexual component of the “peculiar institution” of slavery. While I had a few minor quibbles about the direction and some of the acting decisions in the movie, there was nothing that prevents 12 Years a Slave from being an anything less than an honorable selection.

Personally, among the nominees, I slightly preferred Alfonso Cuaron’s survival-in-space odyssey Gravity, simply because it was more pioneering in Continue reading 17TH ANNUAL ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY AWARDS (WITH OUR VOTES AND COMMENTS) →