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.
Canonically Weird (The List)

56. TAXIDERMIA (2006)

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“Just as the body is overcome by desire, so naturalism is overcome by surrealism…”–György Pálfi, director’s statement to Taxidermia

Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY: György Pálfi

FEATURING: Csaba Czene, Gergö Trócsányi, Marc Bischoff

PLOT: Three short stories exploring three perverted generations, beginning with an extremely horny soldier in the private service of a lieutenant. His illegitimate child grows up to become a sport eater on the Hungarian national squad. The grandchild is a socially inept taxidermist who cares for his grumpy, obese father and his caged cats.

Still from Taxidermia (2006)

BACKGROUND:

  • This was Pálfi’s second movie, after the just-as-weird but much gentler Hukkle.
  • The first two segments of the film are based on short stories by writer Lajos Parti Nagy.  Pálfi wrote the third episode himself.
  • While working on Taxidermia, Pálfi won the 2004 Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award, a $10,000 grant intended to be used to help the filmmaker create his next project.  The grant includes a promise for Japanese distribution for the completed film (estimated value: $90,000).

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  A man ejaculating a torrent of flame.  (Don’t worry, you won’t have to watch long to catch this sight).

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: By itself, the middle section of the triptych of stories—concerning the competitive eater with Olympic dreams—would have made a decidedly odd movie. Flank that tale with stories of a WWII soldier with a hallucinatory libido and a taxidermist with demented aesthetics, stir with surrealism and garnish with grotesquerie, and you have one of the 366 Weirdest Movies of all time.


English language trailer for Taxidermia

COMMENTS: Taxidermia will almost break the needle on your “I never thought I’d see Continue reading 56. TAXIDERMIA (2006) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: HEADS OF CONTROL: THE GORUL BAHEU BRAIN EXPEDITION (2006)

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BewareWeirdest!

DIRECTED BY: Pat Tremblay

FEATURING: Neil Napier, and amateurs who answered a newspaper ad

PLOT: Pharmaceutical molecules visualized as alien beings travel inside the mind of a

Still from Heads of Control (2006)

man afflicted with dissociative identity disorder and collect various “personalities,” who are examined as they perform monologues in front of surreal computer generated backgrounds.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s not released.  But even if it were released, it’s too uneven to qualify for a list of the 366 Best Weird Movies, although it would definitely have a shot at a list of the weirdest movies ever made regardless of quality.

COMMENTS: Before beginning the description of Heads of Control, I must explain why it earns a “beware” rating.  Normally, I reserve the “beware” badge for movies that are badly done, or even, in some cases, movies that are morally bad.  Heads of Control, however, meets neither of those criteria; although it’s cheap and uneven, it is quite competently mounted and the experimental impulse behind it is admirable.  Here, the rating is given due to the simple fact that this movie is so far out, so much like a performance art piece, that will only appeal to a very small slice of the most dedicated avant-gardists, or to those looking for the ultimate micro-budget drug trip film.  This experiment requires work on the viewers part to watch, and anyone looking for something remotely resembling a normal narrative movie is going to be hugely disappointed.

With that intriguing warning out of the way, just what is Heads of Control?  It begins with the protagonist, Max, being attacked by river zombies; it quickly appears that this is a hallucination, as we see Max in a mental institution being shot up with drugs.  Soon, we are inside Max’s diseased brain, watching a pair of hooded creatures.  The subordinate journeys into the patient’s psychedelically appointed neurons to fetch various two-dimensional rectangles from his tangled neural networks, which the superior creature places into a floating computer monitor.  The pair then watch the results, which consist

Continue reading CAPSULE: HEADS OF CONTROL: THE GORUL BAHEU BRAIN EXPEDITION (2006) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

55. O LUCKY MAN! (1973)

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“Lindsay… was never into realism.  He wanted it real, but not realistic.”–Malcolm McDowell

“O Lucky Man! is a film about the real world.  I think that everything in it is recognizable to people who look around with open eyes and can see the kind of world we’re living in.  But of course it makes it’s comment through comedy and through satire, because I think the world today is too complex and too mad and too bad for one to be able to make a straight, serious comment.”–Lindsay Anderson

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Lindsay Anderson

FEATURING: Malcolm McDowell, , , Arthur Lowe, Alan Price, Lindsay Anderson

PLOT: Mick Travis is an eager, ambitious trainee at a coffee company who gets a big break when the firm’s top salesman in the Northeast territory goes missing under mysterious circumstances and he’s picked to replace him.  With his engaging smile and can-do attitude, his career begins promisingly, but soon a sting of unfortunate coincidences befall him. A plague of strange events drive him across the 1970s English landscape, as he is mistaken for a spy, volunteers for medical experiments, falls in with a touring rock band, becomes the personal assistant of a ruthless capitalist, goes to prison, and works at a soup kitchen.

Still from O Lucky Man! (1973)

BACKGROUND:

  • McDowell is Mick Travis in this film. He played a character of the same name in three of director Lindsay Anderson’s films, each completed in a different decade: if… (1968), O Lucky Man! (1973), and Britannia Hospital (1982). Other than sharing the same name, there is no evidence that Mick Travis is intended to be the same character at different stages of life.
  • McDowell came up with the core idea for the script, drawing on his own pre-fame experiences as a coffee salesman. McDowell worked on the script with screenwriter David Sherwin (If…).  In an interview, McDowell recalls that he was having trouble thinking of an ending and Anderson asked him how his real life adventures as a coffee salesman ended. “That’s your ending,” Anderson told him.
  • This was McDowell’s next project after completing A Clockwork Orange in 1971, cementing his position as the most important weird actor of the early 1970s.
  • Director Anderson had tried to make documentary about singer-songwriter Alan Price before he began O Lucky Man!, but could not obtain funding to license the songs. Anderson instead invited Price to write the songs for this movie and to appear as the leader of the touring band in the film.
  • Almost all of the actors in the film play multiple parts. Arthur Lowe won a BAFTA Best Supporting Actor Award for his triple-role as Mr. Duff, Charlie Johnson and Dr. Munda (in blackface).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The final party scene, with the entire cast dancing to the theme song while balloons drop from the ceiling, although the shot of Dr. Millar’s medical experiments is unforgettable as well.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: As if Mick Travis’ improbable class-trotting adventures across 1970s Britain weren’t strange enough, Lindsay Anderson sprinkles weirdness and non sequiturs throughout, including Kafkaesque interrogations, a half-man half-hog, and an unexpected breastfeeding scene. Any film in which a boarding-room neighbor inexplicably gives a young man a “golden” suit and sends him out into the world with the sage advice “try not to die like a dog,” is tipping to the weird end of the scale.

Original trailer for O Lucky Man!

COMMENTS: The standard line on O Lucky Man! is that it is a satire on the capitalist Continue reading 55. O LUCKY MAN! (1973) →

Canonically Weird (The List)

54. YOU, THE LIVING [DU LEVANDE] (2007)

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Recommended

“Be pleased then, you living one, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe’s ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.”–Goethe, Roman Elegies, the quote that begins You, the Living

DIRECTED BY: Roy Andersson

FEATURING: A large cast of unknowns, who are given approximately equal weight in the story

PLOT: A man napping on a couch awakes, looks into the camera, and tells us that he had a nightmare that bombers were coming. The movie then shows us fifty or so dryly absurd scenes involving many unhappy characters in a nameless Swedish city, some of whom relate their dreams to us. Memorable sketches include a musician who tells us of his mutual fund performance while making love and a young girl spurned by a rock musician who dreams that they get married.

Still from You, the Living (Du Levande) (2007)

BACKGROUND:

  • Director Roy Andersson made short films beginning in 1967.  After his first two features, En kärlekshistoria (1970) and Giliap (1975), he began directing commercials and did not return to movies until the critically acclaimed (and Canonically Weird) Songs from the Second Floor (2000). This, only his fourth feature film, was completed when he was 64 years old.
  • You, the Living was refused funding by the Swedish Film Institute; Andersson reportedly accused the body of nepotism after the requested funding was instead granted to a relative of a member of the Institute. The movie was eventually completed with funding from five different countries, and is officially listed as a Swedish-French-German-Danish-Norwegian co-production.
  • The actors in the film are mostly amateurs with no previous feature film credits. The musician is played by Eric Bäckman, a member of the Swedish gothic metal band “Deathstars.”
  • All of the scenes (except one exterior) were shot on sound stages created in Andersson’s own studio.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Everyone talks about the bittersweet wedding fantasy, although the nude heavyset woman riding a skinny man while wearing his spiked military band helmet is also fairly indelible, perhaps for the wrong reasons.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Disorientingly constructed as a series of sketches with common characters, some completely naturalistic and some totally absurd, united by uneasy, melancholy comedy, You, the Living feels like a series of dreams trapped inside a larger dream.


English language DVD release trailer for You, the Living

COMMENTS: An enigmatic movie deserves an enigmatic title, and You, the Living gives Continue reading 54. YOU, THE LIVING [DU LEVANDE] (2007) →

Capsules

BITCH SLAP (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Rick Jacobson

FEATURING: Julia Voth, Erin Cummings, America Olivo

PLOT: Three chesty babes fight punk interlopers, each other, and the screenwriters’ over-infatuation with flashbacks while searching for a treasure in the desert.

Still from Bitch Slap (2009)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s postmodern pretensions and post-Memento plotting show an ambition for the offbeat, but the producers ultimately understand that it’s cleavage shots and catfights that pay the bills. An absurdly overdeveloped plot, exaggerated B-movie archetypes, and crazy flashback set pieces staged before unconvincing but imaginative green screen vistas turn Bitch Slap a slightly weirder, but not weird enough, version of a late night cable jiggle-fest.

COMMENTS: A Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! homage made with a sub-Tarantino snarkiness, Bitch Slap plays fine if you go in with the right (i.e., low) expectations. The three actresses do well and tackle their roles with relish—Olivo is particularly memorable as Camaro, the pill-popping psycho—but the metaphysically threatening sexuality of a Tura Satana is missing from this batch of castrating Amazons. Great satire it is not, and at times too much winking self-awareness threatens to sink it, but in the end the correct spirit of silliness almost always  prevails. It’s one thing when a sleaze rock anthem starts playing and the camera goes slo-mo and split-screen while zooming  leeringly on the ladies’ sweaty bosoms and provocatively cocked hips as they shovel in the desert dressed in tank-tops or tattered evening gowns. It’s another level of goofiness altogether when the gals temporarily forget about the crime kingpin who’s hunting them down so that they can cool off by throwing jugs of ice water onto one another.

Back stories are revealed in frequent flashbacks, but these serve little function other than allowing the filmmakers to set up crazed green screen set-pieces.  There’s a magical realist scene where a sparkling angel-winged dancer takes stage as the strip club DJ improbably spins “Ave Maria,” a nunsploitation interlude, and a ridiculous shootout on the Las Vegas Strip (which plays even funnier when you realize that the characters, posed in front of scattered neon landmarks, must be firing their automatic weapons at each other from miles away with no possible lines of sight). Add into the mix a chick-fighting Japanese schoolgirl named Kinki wielding a flesh-rending yo-yo, and there’s enough craziness to keep weirdsploitation fans entertained.

In keeping with the post-feminist theme (a character conspicuously carries around a tome bearing the title “Slutty Bitches in Post-feminist America”), there’s no actual nudity from the leads. The bitch-goddess archetypes here keep their goodies conspicuously displayed on the shelf, but don’t give away free previews; their mammary charms are just bait. Men are of little use to them; the three prefer to make love (and war) with each other. The male cast are annoyances to be disposed with as quickly as possible, after they’ve been actually or symbolically castrated. This is empowering female iconography, though only to gorgeous lesbians with gigantic breasts. A major downside to the film is the fact that it goes on about twenty minutes too long; the spell the flick casts seeps away the longer it plays. This is the rare sexploitation case where drastically trimming down the lesbian love scenes and catfights would actually have helped the movie.

Another downer is the recycling of a well-known plot twist from a popular 1990s thriller; it’s not only embarrassingly obvious, but pointless, since twist endings aren’t really a feature of the genre they’re spoofing anyway. Still, if you can overlook those flaws, and the fact that the movie projects the sense that it believes it’s smarter than its Russ Meyer source material (it isn’t), you may find that Bitch Slap isn’t a total bust.

The director and producer previously worked on the syndicated television series “Hercules: The Legendary Adventures” and “Xena: Warrior Princess,” and Kevin Sorbo, Lucy Lawless and Rene O’Connor all show up in bit roles. Stunt coordinator Zoe Bell worked on “Xena” and also as a stunt double in Tarantino’s Kill Bill and Grindhouse.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“..despite these (and other) glitches, there’s a grungy vigor to Bitch Slap at its very best moments…there’s also just enough carnage, cans, and plain old weirdness to keep the wheels spinning throughout. (Every time I started to get bored with the flick, it threw something new and weirder into the mix. In B-grade jiggle-action homages, that kind of stuff can go a long way.)”–Scott Weinberg, FEAR.net