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.
Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

Leave a comment

Here’s what we’ll be screening next week: every film geek’s favorite avant-garde propaganda documentary, The Man With a Movie Camera (1929); the minimalist Western Meek’s Cutoff (2011); Careful (1992), another Freudian/Expressionist stew from , this one set in a repressed Alpine village plagued by avalanches; and more musical misogynist madness courtesy of Gold Diggers of 1933.

As we begin our review of the candidates for our Weirdest Search Term of the Week contest, we wish to highlight a surprisingly persistent fallacy: many searchers out there believe that Google is psychic. How else to explain searches for “weird movies that i like” and “what was this film about?” To get one more preliminary mention out of the way, we’d like to give special recognition to “onlion saxy grail and hores” for being the only search term we’ve ever seen that does not bring up a porn site in the first page of Google results. That’s some impressive mangling of the English language! On to our standard contestants: we really liked “free longpantys” (for some reason we like to imagine “Longpantys” is the pseudonym of some sort of feminist rabble rouser who’s been imprisoned in Iran, but that’s just us). The judges were also impressed with “hustler sad clown and his love nurse,” which might be the title of an abandoned Larry Flynt video project. But nothing caught our attention like “adult diaper rubber pants made in thailand burnout video,” which gave us a startling mental image while warning us about a potential geriatric health catastrophe, thus earning right to be named 366 Weird Movies’ Weirdest Search Term of the Week.

Here’s how the ridiculously-long-and-ever-growing reader-suggested review queue looks at this moment in history: Careful (next week!); “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; Dellamorte Dellamore [AKA Cemetery Man]; The Hour-glass Sanatorium [Saanatorium pod klepsidra] (out of print in Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: DOGGIEWOGGIEZ! POOCHIEWOOCHIEZ! (2012)

Doggiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez! has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time. Please make any comments on the official Certified Weird entry.

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Commodore Gilgamesh, Ghoul Skool

FEATURING: None (found footage and movie clips, although you can catch glimpses of faded celebrities like Tim Allen and Gary Busey)

PLOT: 55 minutes of 1 to 5 second clips of strange and funny dog footage from movies and

Still from Doogiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez!

videotapes, arranged into a psychedelic montage that loosely follows the plot of Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s surrealist epic The Holy Mountain.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: You would think a “remake” of The Holy Mountain made up from found footage of dog movies would easily qualify as one of the 366 weirdest movies of all time. There are only two obstacles to adding Doggiewoggiez! to the List immediately. One is a philosophical issue: since this is just a compilation of clips—albeit one put together with wit and skill—with no original material save for a few kaleidoscopic canine collages, does it even meet the definition of a “movie”? The second objection is more practical than philosophical: if Doggiewoggiez! is in fact a “movie,” it potentially fails “the grandma test.” When considering a movie for the List, I imagine showing the movie to my grandma (God rest her soul); if at any time during the imaginary screening she leaves the room, muttering under her breath, “that was weird,” I add the film to the List. Now, I didn’t show this movie to my dead grandma, but I did show it to a living grandma—and she loved it and thought it was cute. Can a movie be truly weird if dog-loving grandmas find it adorable?

COMMENTS: A startling indictment of the indignities desperate Hollywood producers will inflict upon man’s best friend in the name of cheap entertainment, Doggiewoogiez! features every terrible sub-Disney talking dog movie in which an uncomprehending pooch is forced to recite a horrible pun acting against a slumming Dave Thomas, Fred Willard, or Cuba Gooding, Jr. And it’s not just the major Hollywood players that are into abusing the long-suffering fidos, either, as Doggiewoggiez! collects plenty of examples of amateurs touting undignified forms of dog massage, puppy training, and owners posing nude with their pooches. The consortium at Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: DOGGIEWOGGIEZ! POOCHIEWOOCHIEZ! (2012) →

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 5/4/2012

Leave a comment

A look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…

Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Meeting Evil: Samuel L. Jackson plays a serial killer who sucks an average white male suburbanite into a “surreal, nightmarish murder spree…” Directed by … now where have we heard that name before… oh no, that isn’t promising. Meeting Evil official site.

IN DEVELOPMENT:

The Garbage Pail Kids Movie remake: Does this sound like a pitch you would accept if you were a studio head? “Let’s remake a creepy 1987 flop kids movie based on a gross-out novelty card fad that was popular for about three weeks twenty five years ago!” Apparently, if you’re Michael Eisner, you say “yes, please.” Mike, this kind of decision is exactly why you’re the former CEO of Walt Disney. Deadline breaks the story, and not on April 1 (we double checked the date).

Zomboobies! (est. 2013): How to describe this: possibly what would result if Lloyd Kaufman was hired by a Japanese B-movie studio to direct a high concept Lucio-Fulci-meets-Russ-Meyer script? Whatever it is, it already has a website with a NSFW (in this case, “nearly safe for work”) teaser trailer. Zomboobies official site.

NEW ON DVD:

There are no new weird releases on DVD this week. I’m not sure we remember that ever happening before. Nonetheless, the Blu-ray equipped may find something of interest this week (see below).

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Miramax Triple Feature: eXistenZ (1999)/B. Monkey (1998)/Malevolent (2002): Multi-movie packs are the latest studio gimmick; they can be good deals if you happen to like the movies featured. This particular collection seems fairly random. eXistenZ, David Cronenberg‘s virtual reality thriller, is by far the most interesting title here. B. Monkey (1998) is a neo-noir with Asia Argento as a femme fatale, and the generically-titled Malevolent (2002) is a generic-sounding maverick cop picture with Lou Diamond Phillips. Buy Existenz /B. Monkey /Malevolent [Blu-ray].

“The Tim Burton Collection”: Speaking of multi-movie packs, now this one is a good deal; seven films on Blu-ray for what you expect to pay for two discs, plus a collectible booklet. The set includes all of Burton‘s Warner Brothers output, meaning you get Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Batman Returns, Mars Attacks!, The Corpse Bride, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This set is (currently?) exclusive to Amazon.com. Buy “The Tim Burton Collection” [Blu-ray].

The Wizard of Gore (1970)/The Gore-Gore Girls (1972): See what we’re saying? They can’t sell just one movie per disc anymore. This Something Weird double feature lives up to the brand name with two of goremeister ‘ weirdest efforts, made in an era when he was trying to reinvigorate his violence formula by adding a dose of surrealism. The Wizard of Gore concerns a grand-guignol stage magician whose illusions become reality after the show is over. The Gore-Gore Girls is about a slasher of strippers, is a comedy, and was Lewis’ final movie for 37 years until he made Blood Feast II: All U Can Eat. Buy The Wizard of Gore/The Gore Gore Girls [Blu-ray].

FREE ONLINE MOVIES:

This is Why Everyone Hates You (2011): This thirty-minute long, self-effacing comedy is a DIY 8 1/2, only with bananas crushed between toes, Spaghetti-O spitting, and a leather slave in a cardboard box. It’s also pretty darn funny. We highlighted the trailer (which you can see here) last week, but since nothing on YouTube caught our fancy this week we thought we’d give you another chance to catch it. Watch This is Why Everyone Hates You free.

What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.

Canonically Weird (The List)

112. THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE EIGHTH DIMENSION (1984)

15 Comments

“Would a watermelon in the midst of a chase sequence not be, in its own organic way, emblematic of our entire misunderstood enterprise? At once totally logical and perfectly irrational?”–W.D. Richter, explaining why there is a watermelon inside the Banzai Institute

DIRECTED BY: W.D. Richter

FEATURING: Peter Weller, John Lithgow, , , , Vincent Schiavelli

PLOT: We are first introduced to Buckaroo Banzai as he rushes by helicopter from completing a delicate neurosurgery to test-drive a trans-dimensional race car in the Nevada desert. Banzai successful breaches the Eighth Dimension with his oscillation overthruster, but the experiment attracts the attention of the mad Dr. Lizardo, as well as a gang of Lectroid aliens who also want the device. Between rock and roll gigs and particle physics press conferences, Buckaroo and his band of scientist/musician/adventurers, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, will uncover an alien conspiracy that (naturally) threatens the fate of the world.

Still from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984)

BACKGROUND:

  • This was writer W.D. Richter’s first directorial effort after having half-a-dozen screenplays produced (including the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Banzai eventually became a hit on VHS but was a huge flop in theaters, losing six million dollars and bankrupting the production studio. Richter only directed one other movie, the 1991 independent comedy Late for Dinner, although he continued to write screenplays (including Big Trouble in Little China). Richter did not write the script for Buckaroo Banzai, however; it was penned by his pal Earl Mac Rauch.
  • The name of the evil front corporation in Banzai, Yoyodyne, is a reference to a fictional corporation that appears in Thomas Pynchon’s novels.
  • In 2003 Entertainment Weekly ranked Buckaroo Banzai as the #43 cult movie of all time.
  • The sequel promised by the end credits, Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League, was of course never made, although legend has it that Richter is still trying to get it produced to this day. In 1998 pre-production work was done on a Buckaroo television series for the Fox network, but the show was never picked up. The Buckaroo brand has persisted through the years with a novelization and comic book adaptations.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: We require a flashback to show how the Eighth Dimension was originally discovered by a then-sane Dr. Emilio Lizardo—but how to introduce it without disrupting the flow of the story? This movie believes the most natural way to incorporate the memory is to have a now-insane Dr. Lizardo hook electrodes onto his tongue and shock himself so that arcs of lightning fly out of his eardrums. We have to assume this bizarre home-electroshock therapy explains the perfect cinematic precision of the following flashback sequence, because no other sane theory is offered for Lizardo’s act of high-voltage masochism.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Refer to the plot synopsis. Any movie that successfully incorporates a band of rock and roll scientists, an invasion by aliens uniformly named “John,” the Eighth Dimension, inexplicable watermelons, and Jeff Goldblum as a New Jersey neurosurgeon who dresses like a cowboy—while working inside the Hollywood system, with a $12 million dollar budget—has worked hard enough to deserve a space on the List of the Best Weird Movies ever made.


Original trailer for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension

COMMENTS: According to an unofficial Buckaroo Banzai FAQ, the most frequently asked Continue reading 112. THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE EIGHTH DIMENSION (1984) →