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.
Carlos Atanes is a Spanish filmmaker who proudly describes his life’s work as “weird” (and was using the term before this site came into existence). He’s the creator of the bizarre feature films FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions (2004), Proxima(2007), and Maximum Shame (2010), all of which are reviewed here, as well as dozens of short subjects. His official website describes his ideal fan as one who likes “fantasy, weirdness and oddity” and is “part of that public who has a good time with risky and different things and with the cinema that recreates alternative and personal universes.” Since that description fits 366 Weird Movies readers perfectly, we figured we would play matchmaker between Carlos Atanes and our fans—and get a top 10 Weird Films list to add to our collection in the process.
This interview was conducted by Gregory J. Smalley with Mr. Atanes via email in October and November of 2011. His “Top 10 Weird Movie List” appears at the bottom of the interview.
366: You’ve announced a new project, Gallino, which you describe as a”pornophilosophical film.” What can you tell our readers about the movie?
Atanes: It is a step forward in my rise to weirdness. Gallino is related to my last movie Maximum Shame in many of its subjects. There are different actors and characters, other aesthetics and other conflicts, but in fact it is like a next part, a complement to Maximum Shame. Both are like a “double feature.” Gallino goes deep into parallel realities, meta-narrative and blurred borders between the pornographic and and the non-pornographic. Why do we consider one thing pornographic and not another, exactly? Why some things are visible/presentable and other things are not? So, Gallino is an strange trip along the cracks, halfway between dream and wakelfulness, porn and no porn, skin Continue reading CARLOS ATANES: THE INTERVIEW & TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIE LIST→
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.
NEW ON DVD:
Bellflower (2011): Read our capsule review. Two hard-drinking slackers who build post-apocalyptic vehicles in their spare time experience love, loss, and non-linear narrative. Side note: the marketers have removed the word “weird” from the critical quote they selected for the cover. Buy Bellflower.
Evil Dead 2 (1987): Read the Certified Weird entry! All three of Sam Raimi ‘s Evil Dead moves are constantly being reissued in new packages. Rights to 2 have switched hands from Anchor Bay to Lions Gate, and this “25th Anniversary” re-release promises an improved picture (although some reviewers have said the difference isn’t very noticeable) and a mix of old and new featurettes (the commentary track is old). Buy Evil Dead 2 (25th Anniversary Edition).
Futurist Life Redux (2009): Viva Futurista is a lost film, created as a series of linked shorts by eleven founding members of the Futurist art movement in 1916. Futurist Life Redux is an experimental, loose and modernized reconstruction of what that original movie may have looked like, re-imagined for the 21st century from the original creators notes and a few surviving stills. Most of the directors come from the performance art world, with George (Sins of the Fleshapoids) Kuchar a noteworthy exception. If the clip below is representative, then these are weird, yeah. Buy Futurist Life Redux.
Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis (1927/1984): In 1984 composer Giorgi Moroder restored Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and in a controversial decision, colorized the movie and gave it a pop-music score by the likes of Billy Squier, John Anderson, Freddy Mercury, Pat Benetar, and so on. At the time Moroder was fresh off an Academy Award for writing the song “What a Feeling” for Flashdance. Buy Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis.
Griff the Invisible (2010): A clerk who moonlights as a masked vigilante meets a girl lost in daydreams in this Australian romantic comedy. Half the reviewers who’ve seen it use some form of the word “quirk” to describe it (and one even uses a form of “weird”). Buy Griff the Invisible.
“Half Pint Brawlers, Season 1” (2010): We never caught it on its brief Spike TV run, but the packaging (“WARNING: X-treme and Absurd!”), caught our eye. It’s a reality show about a traveling troupe of wrestling little people led by a character who calls himself “Puppet the Psycho Dwarf.” The performers call themselves “midgets,” which got them in trouble with the Little People of America. As an aside, your editor sincerely hopes the word “midget” makes a comeback; it sounds far less demeaning than “little person.” Buy “Half Pint Brawlers: Season 1”.
“Neverwhere” (1996): This 180-minute BBC miniseries concerns a chap who finds himself trapped in a fantastic underground world of demons and magic dubbed “London Below.” Co-scripted by fantasy author Neil Gaiman, it has a cult reputation and special effects on the level of a “Dr. Who” episode. Gaimain later turned the screenplay into a novel. Buy “Neverwhere”.
The Tree (2011): An eight-year old girl becomes convinced that her dead father’s spirit inhabits a giant tree growing near the house. Life-affirming Australian magical realism starring the always-odd Charlotte Gainsbourg. Buy The Tree.
The Weird World of Blowfly (2011): Documentary focusing on Clarence Reid, better known as his alter-ego Blowfly, the proto-rapper and x-rated auteur of 1970s “party albums” packed with brilliantly brain-dead song parodies like “Spermy Night In Georgia” and “My Baby Keeps Farting In My Face.” Hey, it’s got “weird” right there in the title, of course we’re going to mention it! Buy The Weird World Of Blowfly.
Despair (1978): A chocolate magnate goes mad; he watches himself making love to his wife and believes a laborer is his doppelgänger. Rainer Werner Fassbinder directs Dirk Bogarde in Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel (is that enough name-dropping for one sentence?). Buy Despair [Blu-ray].
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (1962): This tale of a mad-scientist who keeps his decapitated fiancée’s head alive while he searches for a stripper’s body to slap it on is one of the sleazier, and stranger, artifacts of its era. “I’m just a head… and you’re whatever you are… but together, we’re strong!” Watch The Brain That Wouldn’t Die free on YouTube.
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.
PLOT: Documentary covering exploitation films made in the Philippines in the 1970s and 1980s, both by Filipinos and by American companies looking for cheap labor and exotic locations.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: A few of the films mentioned (For Y’ur Height Only?) might be worthy of consideration for the List, but this documentary survey is a curiosity piece—and possibly a place to get ideas for your Netflix queue.
COMMENTS: There are two strands to Machete Maidens. One is the history of an enterprising but anarchic third-word film industry and the American carpetbaggers who flocked there to make cheap pictures, packed with war stories from those who were there. Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos (who loaned army helicopters to American filmmakers in the evenings after they’d spent the mornings strafing Islamic rebels) and notorious first lady Imelda (who allegedly ordered dead workers’ bodies to be left in the cement of the Manila Film Center so the project could be completed in time to host a film festival) remain in the background as villains throughout the entire epic. On the front lines, American filmmakers and actors relate stories of pistol-packing makeup men and cockroach-infested living conditions (at one point Sid Haig describes his accommodations by saying “I saw a rat carrying a kitten out the window”).
But as interesting as this backdrop might be, the main attraction is not the island’s political scenery, but the movies made there for export. These reflected the evolving shock aesthetic of the American drive-ins, not tropical politics. The scandalous profit margins of native filmmaker Eddie Romero’s “Blood Island” horror movies, with their cheap rubber-masked monsters menacing topless Filipino babes, were the proof-of-concept legendary low-budget producer Roger Corman needed to ship contract director Jack Hill off to the islands to produce his smash hit The Big Doll House. This revolutionary sleaze introduced the world to the concept of women’s prisons as topless entertainment centers, and also to the enormous talents of burgeoning bust icon Continue reading CAPSULE: MACHETE MAIDENS UNLEASHED! (2010)→
PLOT: British farmers unite with Churchill and Scotsmen to repel Nazis who invade London by
tunneling under the English Channel.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The idea of an absurd Nazi invasion of England acted out by children’s toys is odd and appealing, but the premise is undercooked, and never hits either the weird or (more importantly) the comic notes that it should.
COMMENTS: Hitler in a dress! That should be funny, right? It could be either a great punchline, or the beginning of a running series of gags that see (for example) der Führer more concerned with what’s going on with his hemlines than with developments on the front lines. But Hitler’s transvestite cameo is emblematic of the problem with Jackboots. The joke is never developed; the movie just trots out the dictator dressed as the Queen of England, with a pearl-handled Luger, and expects us to laugh. Although the occasional amusing one-liner slips through the fog of war (usually delivered by Timothy Spall in his dead-on Churchill impression), for the most part Jackboots‘ quips don’t exactly stomp on your funny bone. They’re sparse, as well. A lot of time is devoted to chuckle-free dramatic scenes between big-handed farmhand turned soldier Chris (McGregor), his lady-love Daisy (Pike), and her disapproving Vicar father (Grant), as well as to intricate battles between plastic Panzers and Punjabi guards that—considering they’re enacted with toy tanks fighting Ken dolls in turbans—are more thrilling than expected. Jackboots is part WWII movie parody (with a roughneck American pilot who thinks the Nazis are Commies), part clever historical references (the defeated Brits retreat to Hadrian’s Wall, and the Germans are fearful of pursuing where even the Romans dared not go), and part pure silliness (a Braveheart spoof takes up a large part of the last act). There is a running undercurrent of mock-prejudice against the Scottish (who are depicted as cannibals in skirts) that must be funnier to U.K. residents than to those in the U.S. and elsewhere—at least, I hope it is; otherwise, it’s just another Jackboots comic misfire. The movie manages to be unique without ever finding its own voice, which makes it interesting without ever being engaging. Mainstreamers hoping for a script with the sly gross-out humor of Team America or the pop-culture savvy of TV’s “Robot Chicken” (which uses the same action-figure aesthetic as Jackboots) will be disappointed, if not angry and frustrated, by the oblique comedy on display here. But even if it’s not riotously funny, little touches like a ghoulish pig-nosed Goebbels, a cat who looks like Hitler, puppet gore, and an attack vanguard of bazooka-wielding Nazi dominatrices in black lipstick should be enough to keep weirdophiles watching to the end.
Though the end result is mediocre, Jackboots‘ crazy synopsis managed to attract top-notch cult British acting talent. Besides McGregor, Pike, Spall and Grant, the voiceover cast includes Alan Cumming (as Hitler), Tom Wilkinson (as Goebbels), and Richard O’Brien (as Himmler).
When November and December roll around, we rush to catch up on all the weird stuff you may have missed in 2011. To that end, we’ll be looking at another quartet of new releases this upcoming week, starting off with this sick ‘n weird patricide pic Father’s Day (2011). Next we’ll check out what happens when Nazi action figures led by Hitler in an evening gown invade London in the animated alternate history comedy Jackboots on Whitehall (2010), then ogle Machete Maidens Unleashed! (2010), an exploitation doc/clip show in the American Grindhouse vein, but focused on WTF Filipino flicks of the 1970s. And just to remind you that “new release” doesn’t always mean something made in the last year or two, Alfred Eaker will give you the skinny on Warner Archive’s long-awaited DVD-R of Erich von Stroheim’s classic silent melodrama The Merry Widow (1925).
We are distressed at the deadening normality of the search terms that passed through our server logs this week. We are contractually obligated to pick a Weirdest Search Term of the Week, however, so we will do our best with what we have. A search for “hitler magic porno video” might look weird if you’re running a website devoted to pictures of cute kitties in baseball caps, but for us it’s just par for the course: if there actually were Hitler magic porno videos, we like to think we would be the ones covering them. A little bit weirder is “hollywood old movies black and white village saxy shat”: again, if such films only existed, we would be the ones bringing you the old Hollywood movies with the saxiest shat. We’ll go in a different direction and give this week’s Weirdest award to “seeex aanal poooorn.” The suggestion that more vowels = hotter pr0n search results is bizarre enough to squeak by in a weak field.
We’re neglecting covering titles in the vast reader-suggested review queue, but you guys haven’t slowed down making your suggestions, meaning the list is growing to truly embarrassing proportions. Check it out and see what we’re talking about: Kairo [AKA Pulse];The American Astronaut; Blood Tea and Red Strings; The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. II (for Lucifer Rising, Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE→
Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!
Carlos Atanes is a Spanish filmmaker who proudly describes his life’s work as “weird” (and was using the term before this site came into existence). He’s the creator of the bizarre feature films FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions (2004), Proxima (2007), and Maximum Shame (2010), all of which are reviewed here, as well as dozens of short subjects. His official website describes his ideal fan as one who likes “fantasy, weirdness and oddity” and is “part of that public who has a good time with risky and different things and with the cinema that recreates alternative and personal universes.” Since that description fits 366 Weird Movies readers perfectly, we figured we would play matchmaker between Carlos Atanes and our fans—and get a top 10 Weird Films list to add to our collection in the process.
Atanes: It is a step forward in my rise to weirdness. Gallino is related to my last movie Maximum Shame in many of its subjects. There are different actors and characters, other aesthetics and other conflicts, but in fact it is like a next part, a complement to Maximum Shame. Both are like a “double feature.” Gallino goes deep into parallel realities, meta-narrative and blurred borders between the pornographic and and the non-pornographic. Why do we consider one thing pornographic and not another, exactly? Why some things are visible/presentable and other things are not? So, Gallino is an strange trip along the cracks, halfway between dream and wakelfulness, porn and no porn, skin Continue reading CARLOS ATANES: THE INTERVIEW & TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIE LIST 
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