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.
Capsules

CAPSULE: SILENT HILL: REVELATION (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Michael J. Bassett

FEATURING: Adelaide Clemens, , Kit Harington, Malcolm McDowell

PLOT: Six years after the events of the original Silent Hill, Sharon (now living under the alias “Heather”) returns to the mysterious ghost town to rescue her abducted father and face ancient evils left over from the last movie.

Still from Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Christophe Gans’ original Silent Hill adaptation was a combination of campy confusion and apocalyptic atmosphere that hit all the right nightmare notes and was strange enough to worm its way onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies. Six years later, with a journeyman director at the helm and no new ideas to bring to the table other than a gimmicky 3D presentation, the novelty has abandoned the Silent Hill universe, at least in its cinematic incarnation. We’re left with characters we can barely bring ourselves to care about rambling through a progression of jump-scare set pieces.

COMMENTS: Some critics are complaining that Silent Hill: Revelation is “baffling,” incomprehensible” and “makes no sense.” They’re analyzing the issue backwards: it’s actually the parts of the movie that you can make heads or tails of that suck. Basically, this is the old story about a girl who’s having hallucinations, flashbacks or dreams inside of dreams every five minutes because she and her father are on the run from a cult imprisoned in an old mining town by a godlike spirit who is actually her evil twin. When her father gets kidnapped by the cult she must journey to the forbidden town so that a crazy old hag can warn her not to go inside to retrieve the other half of the Seal of Megatron (I swear that’s what it sounded like) from a crazy old coot (a slumming Malcolm McDowell). Seal of Megatron in hand, she’s now free to go to the abandoned amusement park so she can get on the carousel and hug her evil half to death before getting a prime seat to watch another character face off against another boss to defeat another ultimate evil. I suspect that this plot actually makes sense to someone who has played all the video games and performed a scene-by-scene analysis of the first movie, but even if you have a copies of all four Silent Hill Official Strategy Guides on your bookshelf and understand Pyramid Head’s nuanced role in this peculiar mythos, the movie has deeper problems than a confusing plot. Primary among these is the fact that Revelation never generates a real sense of danger for Heather/Sharon; the first third of the movie is filled with so many false scares and dream sequences that we quickly become immune to any threat to the girl’s safety. Her adversaries could easily kill her any time they want to, but simply need to lure her to the inner sanctum for the final showdown, which makes her passage through a world of grasping nightmare monsters an arbitrary journey. Given that lack of tension, other problems, like the risible, deadpan dialogue and the unnecessary and underdeveloped love interest fall by the wayside. A set of dual climaxes that simultaneously make you mutter “huh?” and “is that all there is?” cap off an uninspiring effort. Ho-hum 3D effects include severed fingers floating directly at the audience in slow motion; the movie will not suffer a bit on TV or computer screens from flattening the image. It’s not all bad; the movie does at least look like Silent Hill. The settings are atmospheric, if often clichéd (spooky evil clowns, anyone?). Australian actress Adelaide Clemens, who looks uncannily like Carey Mulligan’s younger sister, is appealing, and it’s always nice to see McDowell hamming it up—he seems to have entered that stage in his career where he’ll take any old role (Suck, Zombex, Suing the Devil) just because he loves working and is no longer afraid to look ridiculous. The main appeal is seeing the creepy Silent Hill monsters brought to life. Pyramid Head, a monster who is exactly what his name says he is, is a boogeyman who seems like he shouldn’t work, and yet he is almost inexplicably scary and cool. The busty faceless zombie nurses, also returning from the original movie, add an element of camp but remain frightening as they flail about blindly with scalpels. Revelation adds an arachnid who uses embalmed heads as eyes to the franchise’s effectively weird bestiary. Although Silent Hill: Revelation is nowhere in the neighborhood of a good movie, dedicated horror fans (and particularly dedicated fans of this franchise) will be able to wring a few drops of bloody entertainment from it.

At this writing Silent Hill: Revelation has an abysmal 5% positive critical rating at Rotten Tomatoes, but scores a respectable 6.7 rating on IMDB. This suggests that the film hit a sweet spot for franchise fans—but only for them. Although a few reviewers have prematurely proclaimed that this disaster will effectively kill off any burgeoning Silent Hill movie franchise, Revelation did manage to earn back almost half its budget in its opening week, despite hurricane Sandy shutting down East Coast theaters. It will almost certainly turn a profit, so we could see more of Pyramid Head in coming years.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“British helmer Bassett… shows no affinity for the grotesquely beautiful surrealism that distinguished the vidgame series and earlier feature.”–Dennis Harvey, Variety (contemporaneous)

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE LAST OF ENGLAND (1988)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Nigel Terry occasionally narrates. There are no characters or speaking parts, and no actor can be said to be “featured” in this film; a pre-fame  appears prominently in it, however.

PLOT: An abstract, impressionistic view of Britain in the late 1980s, contrasted with nostalgic memories of simpler times.

Still from The Last of England (1988)
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: A mysteriously personal and poetic meditation on themes of decay, The Last of England is too restlessly strange to ignore. If anything, its biggest challenge to earning a spot on a list of weird movies may be that it actually strays too far from reality. By abandoning narrative entirely and mucking up the image until it becomes impossible to tell what we’re looking at, Jarman’s film becomes almost completely abstract, the movie equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting.

COMMENTS: Among other odd offerings, The Last of England features men having sex on the Union Jack, terrorists in black ski masks rounding up prisoners, and a wedding where the bridesmaids have full beards. Each of these images has been manipulated three times: the color correction has been toned down to monochrome or amped up to day-glo, the footage has been sped up or slowed down, and the camera’s conventional stability has been abandoned for a deliberately jittery style that is indifferent to conventional framing. As if the welter of abstract scenarios wasn’t disorienting enough, Jarman edits back and forth between two scenes—say, a naked hobo eating cauliflower in a junkyard and a man in a neck brace pouring corn over his head—according to peculiar rhythms, as if he’s alternating rhymed lines of verse. Naturally, the soundscape is an equally convoluted collage, consisting of snippets of poetry combined with Jarman’s own prose ruminations about the decline of England and “found” sounds (football fans, jet fighters, soldiers accepting medals from the Queen). Although the visuals never let up, at times flickering back and forth too fast for the eye or mind to properly process, an eclectic selection of musical recordings occasionally provides some aural respite. The movie even turns into a music video sometimes, as when naked pagans dance in front of a bonfire while highly synthetic club dance music pulses in the background; there are also classical music selections, acoustic guitar interludes, and songs from Barry Adamson, , and the terrifying wailing of Diamanda Galas. Although it makes no disciplined case (juxtaposing clips of English drill instructors with Hitler’s speeches is not a political argument), the movie does have a generically strident leftist political tone. The film’s provocative progressive politics—come on, it’s got two guys doing the nasty on the British flag—contrasts with its elegiac tone. With its bitter disillusionment and nostalgia for a mythically idyllic pre-World War II England—Jarman includes happy home movie footage of his childhood and describes the bombing of London as if it ignited a series of firestorms that were still raging in 1988—England is reminiscent of a more intellectual (if even less coherent) version of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and one suspects that the loss of innocence Derek Jarman bemoans belongs more to Derek Jarman than it does to England. Obviously, this obscure and often frustrating farrago is not for everyone, but those willing to patiently pick through the visual rubble will find scraps and relics of sublime beauty. Jarman’s intellect and passion come across on film so powerfully that you leave feeling more impressed than entertained or enlightened. And, at eighty-seven rambling minutes, the movie can become a chore to watch; The Last of England‘s lasting impact may be to remind us why the short format has become the preferred vehicle for non-narrative experimental films.

In conjunction with the film Jarman also published a (now long out-of-print) book entitled “The Last of England“; reportedly, it dealt mainly with the director’s relationship with his father, who Derek believed was scarred by his experiences as an airman in World War II.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Its inconsolable rage and bitterness is protean, chafing at the absurdities of Thatcher’s England, but also at the wider dome of existence, man’s inhumanity to man, and so on.”–Jaime N. Christley, Slant (DVD)

Capsules

CAPSULE: LISA AND THE DEVIL (1974)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: ,

PLOT: A tourist finds herself staying overnight at a Spanish chateau managed by a butler who is the spitting image of Satan as pictured on a local fresco.

Still from Lisa and the Devil (1974)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: A mildly surreal horror, Lisa might make for interesting Halloween watching for the patient, but it’s too slow-paced with too little payoff to be counted among the greatest weird movies.

COMMENTS: “The entire setting is so right for a tall tale of gloom and perdition,” says one of the guests at a banquet as a manservant played by Telly Savalas serves her slices of rare meat. “We could make one up as we go along.” Given the almost random way the script unfolds, you might suspect that this line of dialogue is a confession rather than a throwaway bit of dinner conversation. It’s not always clear whether the frequent lapses of logic in Lisa and the Devil are meant to be part and parcel of the unsettling atmosphere, or are merely the result of lazy, indifferent screenwriting. After one of their party is found murdered, the owner of the estate in the middle of nowhere suggests to the rest of the party stranded there that there is no need to call the police—and they all accept that view calmly without offering much in the way of a counter-argument. Niggling unanswered questions proliferate: How do the chauffeur and the wife find time for a lovemaking liaison when he’s supposed to be fixing the car? Why is Lisa terrified of a pocketwatch she sees on a table? Whether these minor story issues add to the film’s dream logic or merely frustrate you as you try to settle on a context for this fright tale may determine how you react to the movie. Lisa builds to a perverse and spooky third act as the shameful secrets of the chateau are slowly brought to light, but the first two thirds of the movie are slow and often confusing. The main living denizens of the villa, a blind mother and her fey son, are an intense couple, but top-billed Savalas (who sucks on his trademark lollipop here) makes by far the biggest impression as a slyly diabolical butler. He’s not conventionally sinister or overtly threatening, but like most servants he knows more about the secret workings of the chateau than his masters do, and his blasé glances and mysterious smiles suggest a man whose subservience is an ill-fitting mask for a deeper purpose. As Lisa, star Elke Sommer, on the other hand, is little more than a blank pretty face—not her fault, as the script gives her nothing to do other than gasp, scream and fall unconscious. Lisa has no history and no reason is given for her straying from her tour group, and she is swept along by events with a bewildered expression, offering no resistance. Passivity is her only real character trait. Her lack of dialogue stands out: other characters divulge shocking confessions to her, and she has nothing to say in response. It’s not clear if her silence is a deliberate choice to make her a mysterious tabula rasa, or whether the character is simply underwritten. If it was a conscious decision, I’m not sure the gamble pays off; we are given little reason to care about the fate of this ambiguous protagonist. On the plus side, Bava’s films are always visually luscious, and Lisa is no exception. The dusty Spanish town and the aristocratic villa give him plenty of lush color to work with, and in her mod short blue skirt and mint green blazer, Sommer looks perfectly out of place romping through these classical vistas. She’s as dislocated in her fashion as she is in her psychology. A flashback/dream sequence set in a sylvan glade supplies a visual highlight, and foreshadows a later scene of a nude Sommer waking in a similar-looking ruins. Savalas’ offhand conversations with his collection of life-sized dummies and an ending that induces shivers despite being somewhat obvious are other memorable bits in this oft-odd spook story. The movie has assets: Savalas, the cinematography, and a few moments of thrilling disorientation. At its best it plays like the dream of a mad ghost; but overall this sepulchral tale is too lifeless for a general recommendation. Fans of slow-paced atmospheric horror may find it a worth taking a chance on, though.

Lisa and the Devil was a flop in Italy and was not picked up for American distribution. Producer Alfredo Leone then decided to try to salvage the movie by re-cutting it and shooting new footage with Sommer and Robert Alda (as a priest) to turn the film into an Exorcist clone; the resulting mess was released in the States as The House of Exorcism. It flopped. The 2012 Kino Classics release contains both versions of the film.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Bava art on full display, voluptuous and oneiric…”–Fernando F. Croce, Cinepassion.com (DVD)

Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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Just a reminder: feel free to join us in the new forums. There are a lot of folks there with mystery movies begging for solutions…

Next week’s slate of movies includes our long-anticipated take on the modern midnight movie Beyond the Black Rainbow; to get in the Halloween spirit we’ll take peeks at Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil (1974) and the / teamup The Body Snatcher (1945); and we’ll take care of some old business by restoring the long-lost Certified Weird entry for ‘s bizarre adaptation of ‘s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (re-written from scratch!)

Every week there are a lot of really sick, perverted search queries we come across while combing server logs looking for our Weirdest Search Term of the Week. Many of them are unprintable and, frankly, make us weep for humanity. Our first runner-up this week is kind of sick (though nowhere near the worst), but it’s so bizarrely specific that we couldn’t resist bringing it to your attention: “beautiful girls wearing wrist watch in their hands sexually abusing young guys porn videos.” And while we’re in a dirty mood, we might as well mention the scarcely comprehensible search for “older movie guy puts work in vagina.” Not satisfied yet? Okay, one more naughty one: “anime monster blond girl and guy poop.” Despite all of this, our weirdest search term of the week wasn’t submitted by a registered sex offender, but just a garden variety, G0-rated weirdo: “….. in an aeroplane a beard man moves towards a washroom and someone in hat follows him…… (&*)#!@#&(!@$.” This marks the first time we’ve seen a searcher get so frustrated with a lack of relevant results for his query that he starts swearing before submitting it… and, who was polite enough about it to use grawlixes. Well done, weird sir!

Here’s the ridiculously-long and ever-growing reader suggested review queue: The Hour-glass Sanatorium [Saanatorium pod klepsidra]; Liquid Sky (re-review); Society; Final Programme; “Foutaises”; Bloodsucking Freaks; Lost Highway; Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (official review); Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →