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.
Shorts

SHORT: THE THREATENED ONE (1999)

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threehalfstar

DIRECTED BY:  Signe Baumane

PLOT: An impressionistic interpretation of a Jorge Luis Borges poem featurning a bunny rabbit, a fox, a man and a woman.

The Threatened One: Rated PG-13 for cartoon bosoms and symbolic sex


WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  The dreamlike imagery, especially the flower that ejaculates flowers.

COMMENTS:  Baumane worked with Bill Plympton (who gets a thank you shout in The Threatened One‘s credits) on I Married a Strange Person! The two animators seem to be kindred spirits: they share a “squiggly” style of animation, where even the still frames move and breathe, as well as an absurd sense of visual humor.  The Threatened One adopts a drawing style reminiscent of a children’s book (only with a sea of blood and topless scenes) to illustrate Borge’s bittersweet poem about the consuming power of love.  Love is depicted as a predator, a toothy fox, but having your fleshed ripped by it’s fangs doesn’t seem like such a horrible fate in the end. The short is witty and whimsical, and David Rovin’s music punctuates the atmosphere perfectly. The only slight complaint is that the narrator’s reading, while competent, isn’t as inspired as the rest of the production.

The Threatened One is available on the collection Ten Animated Films by Signe Baumane. More information can be found on Signe Baumane’s website.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“For Borges and Baumane, love triggers the death of the individual.”-Chris Robinson, Unsung Heroes of Animation

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE TOXIC AVENGER (1984)

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DIRECTED BY: Lloyd Kaufman & Michael Herz

FEATURING: Mitchell Cohen

PLOT:  A nerdy teen janitor is tormented by his serial killer peers until he accidentally

Promotional card for The Toxic Avenger (1984) under it's working title, Health Club

falls into a vat of toxic waste and emerges as a mop-wielding, avenging mutant superhero.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: When a movie about a mutant janitor who fights transvestite thugs and, to add insult to injury, presses his wet mop into their heads after he disembowels them can’t find a place on a list of weird movies, you know you’re searching for a very refined brand of weirdness indeed.

COMMENTS:  The Toxic Avenger has just enough craziness going on to make it watchable, but it’s not nearly the classic its cult reputation might suggest. Although an absurd thread runs throughout to keep it sporadically interesting, its sniper-like focus on chesty chicks and cheesy kills keeps it squarely locked in on its target audience of males under 25. Others will find the goofy spoofery seldom funny and often offensive (for example, the hit and run killing of young boys and racial minorities for sport). There are few laugh-out-loud moments for grown-ups, although a scene in the middle of a crime-fighting montage where superhero Toxie helps a housewife with a stubborn jar lid does elicit a chuckle. The centerpiece hostage scene at a restaurant tells you all you need to know: a gang of robbers wearing performance art greasepaint burst in, shoot a blind girl’s seeing-eye dog, and prepare to sodomize her when Toxie arrives. Our hero fights a battle against a gangster with ninja skills who grabs a samurai sword off the wall (of a Mexican restaurant?), and in the end the mutant dweeb gruesomely and painfully dispatches them with a milkshake machine and a deep fryer. It’s a fantasy of nerd revenge against the upper crust of high school society, as Toxie dismembers obnoxious jocks (a justified act, since like all popular people, his tormentors are inhuman monsters who like to mow down kids in their cars and masturbate to the gory Polaroids afterward). The movie invites us to identify with and cheer for Toxie as, Michael Meyers-like, he stalks and kills half-naked girls (who are, of course, evil, and deserve to be dispatched for the good of Tromaville). Ultimately, this Columbine-esque wish fulfillment, where the beleaguered kid not only kills his bullies but becomes a beloved celebrity and gets the girl, creates a subtext that’s far more offensive than any of child killings or the pre-teen white slavery ring Kaufman and Herz try to shock us with.

The Toxic Avenger‘s blend of horror-movie gore, gross-out offensiveness, proudly lowbrow comedy, and absurd touches struck a nerve in the 1980s, when it bypassed the normal movie distribution channels to become one of the first cult videocassette hits. It was so successful that Troma studios has been remaking this same film, under a variety of titles, for the last 25 years.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Like Airplane! for the antisocial set, or a Grimms fairytale gone horribly, horribly wrong, this weird-ass peek into the past proves that some high concepts are indeed eternal.”–Bill Gibron, DVD Talk (21st Anniversary DVD)

Essays

ARTSPLOITATION – THE BASTARD OFFSPRING OF “BLOOD OF A POET” AND “SEX MANIAC”

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Every knows what “exploitation” films are: films that deliberately appeal to audiences baser nature, and try to lure in viewers with the promise of sex, nudity, violence, and moral degeneracy.

When a film tries to appeal to an audience’s higher nature, to their intellect and aesthetic sense, but at the same time promises plenty of sex, nudity, violence, and moral degeneracy, then you have an “artsploitation” film.

Not all art films which deal with sex or include nudity or violence qualify as artsploitation films.  There needs to be some gratuitous or sensationalist element to merit the “-ploitation” suffix.  There’s little truly exploitative about the way sex is treated in Sex and Lucia, for example; sex is a natural part of the character’s relationship and there are good plot and thematic justifications for each coupling.

Although the “artsploitation” genre can’t be reduced to a simple recipe, and does not necessarily involve remaking some sort of recognized formula film in an arty way, as a first step at identifying the category, here’s a short list of some art films that also fit neatly into a recognized exploitation film sub-genre:

  • EL TOPO (1970) = arthouse + Spaghetti Western
  • THE DEVILS (1971) = arthouse + nunsploitation
  • LIQUID SKY (1982) = arthouse + science fiction
  • GOTHIC (1986) = arthouse + horror
  • LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1988) = arthouse + horror
  • SANTA SANGRE (1989) = arthouse + serial killers
  • THE THIEF, THE COOK, HIS WIFE & HER LOVER (1989)= arthouse + gross-out cannibal film
  • DELLAMORTE, DELLAMORE [CEMETARY MAN] (1994) = arthouse + zombie film
  • KIDS (1995) = arthouse + juvenile delinquency
  • NOWHERE (1997) = arthouse + juvenile delinquency + drugsploitation + sci-fi B-movie

Another simple way to identify an artsploitation film: look for the name “Ken Russell” under director.

Exploitation films, which used to play at drive-ins, fleapits and grindhouses, and are now often released directly to video, are considered “trash cinema,” and distinguishable both from mainstream films and from art-house films.  They began as early as the 1930s, when Hollywood’s Hays Code created a lucrative gray market for films dealing with forbidden subject matter like prostitution, drug abuse, and revenge killings.  Cheaply made films such as Reefer Madness [Tell Your Children] (1936) (the famously campy anti-marijuana flick), Child Bride (1938) (which dealt with the “serious” problem of child marriage among hillbillies by having a 12 year old girl perform nude scenes), and Mom and Dad (1945) (which advertised itself as a “hygiene” film and showed the birth of an illegitimate baby in graphic, gaping detail) quickly stepped in to take advantage of Hollywood’s shyness about sex.  An alternative, parallel cinema of forbidden delights Continue reading ARTSPLOITATION – THE BASTARD OFFSPRING OF “BLOOD OF A POET” AND “SEX MANIAC” →

Capsules

BORDERLINE WEIRD: NOWHERE (1997)

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DIRECTED BY:  Gregg Araki

FEATURING: James Duval, Rachel True

PLOT:  Shallow L.A. teenagers take drugs and have kinky sex all day in preparation for the party of the year, while a rubber alien reptile occasionally stalks and abducts them.

nowhere

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  As an attempt at a contemporary update of Repo Man by way of Clueless, Nowhere is weird, but only in the most superficial way possible; ultimately, it lacks the emotional and thematic chops to earn itself a more dignified adjective than “silly” (although less dignified adjectives like “self-indulgent,” “pretentious” and “annoying” do spring to mind).

COMMENTS:  It begins with the portentous pronouncement “L.A. is like… nowhere.  Everyone who lives here is lost,” voiced with emotionless fervor by “Dark” (Keanu Reeves impersonator James Duval) as he masturbates in the shower.  (This should be your first hint that you might want to skip this movie: do you really want to spend 82 minutes watching an inferior version of Keanu Reeves?)  In the course of a day, the film introduces us to such lost characters as bulimiacs, drug addicts, vanishing valley girls, a “Baywatch” hunk/rapist, and teen dominatrices, all of whom are at bottom indistinguishable but for their preferences in body piercings.  Their chief defining characteristic is a lack of character.  What little character development there is involves Dark’s doomed search for true love and his fruitless attempts to convince bisexual gal pal Mel (Rachel True) to stop sharing her nubile body with every Tom, Dick and Mary.  Too occasional chuckles come via the vulgar and exaggerated teen slang. (A three way cameo conversation between val-gals Traci Lords, Shannen Doherty and Rose McGowan about potential beaus to take to the big party who are not gay, dead by their own hand, or under-hung is an engagingly braindead highlight).  Any lighthearted satirical momentum the film may muster, however, is destroyed by the intrusion of ugly realities like date rape and teen suicide that belong in a non-joke movie that would treat these topics with respect.  Writer/director Akari aims his wit at an incredibly easy target—vapid Hollywood teenagers—but he hardly appears less shallow than they are; whenever the script veers dangerously near something that looks like a real human emotion, as in the climax, he’s quick to deploy predictable Gen-X irony to turn the scene into an absurd joke before his skill at eliciting genuine empathy can be tested.

The teens’ irresponsible “empty” hedonistic lifestyle of drugs, partying, and humping hot bodies actually looks pretty appealing, if only the company didn’t totally blow.  The flick may be enjoyed by smart teenagers (even though director Araki seems to have nothing but contempt for teens), but impressionable young minds should be steered towards better adolescent angst comedies like Heathers if it at all possible.  Not currently available on DVD in North America.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This live-action cartoon might be described as a surreal ‘American Graffiti’ crossed with a kinky ‘Beverly Hills 90210,’ as imagined by a punked-out acolyte of John Waters or Andy Warhol…  If it weren’t so overpopulated and desperate to shock, ‘Nowhere’ might have succeeded as a maliciously cheery satire of Hollywood brats overdosing on the very concept of Hollywood.”–Steven Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

Miscellanea

QUIRKY, NOT WEIRD

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“Quirky” can be defined as “full of quirks.”  A “quirk”  is “a strange attitude or habit” (synonyms: oddity, queerness, crotchet).

In the late 1980s to early 1990s, about the time of the rise of the Sundance Festival, “serious” (as opposed to exploitation-style) independent films exploded in the United States.  “Quirky” comedies quickly became a staple of independent movies and low budget movie festivals.  These films had light tones but serious, life-affirming themes, were witty and gently wry (but never ruined the mood by going so far as to be biting), and were filled to the brim with eccentric characters.  The fast-developing sub-genre became a darling of film critics.

One of the first quirky comedies was the early Coen brothers effort, Raising Arizona (1987).  Holly Hunter played an infertile cop with a male name (“Ed”) who falls in love with peaceful burglar Nicolas Cage, who also has an odd name (“Hi”) and occasionally speaks in Shakespearean dialogue.  These characters were highly eccentric but essentially harmless, and although the movie was actually a little bit weird (with Tex Cobb as a mystical biker/bounty hunter with supernatural abilities that surpassed the merely quirky), once the Coen’s more bizarre proclivities were snipped away, Raising Arizona served as a template for quirky movies to follow.  (That quirky and weird can still coexist in the same movie was proven by Chan-wook Park’s I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK [2006], though notably it took an outsider to the American independent film tradition to pull it off.)

The first movie I think of when I think of the modern quirky formula is Baghdad Cafe (1987).  It’s an exemplary cast of quirks: a stranded German housfrau who does magic tricks, a sassy and irritable black woman, an Indian short-order cook, a tattoist, Jack Palance as a retired Hollywood set painter.  It’s set in the desert, the quintessentially quirky locale.  It’s light (real danger never raises its head) and life-affirming (in the end the characters learn and grow from each others’ diametrically opposed quirks).

Other movies that clearly fall into the quirky genre are Roadside Prophets (1992), Benny & Joon (1993), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), Clerks (1994) (a bit more profane and piquant than typical quirk), Napoleon Dynamite (2004), the recently reviewed Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006), and of course, anything by the reigning King Continue reading QUIRKY, NOT WEIRD →