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.
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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DAY OF THE WACKO (2002)

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 Dzien swira

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DIRECTED BY: Marek Koterski

FEATURING: Marek Kondrat

PLOT: An easily irritated Polish teacher with OCD spends a long day in increasingly surreal, comic situations.

Still from Day of the Wacko (2002)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: This cult Polish comedy is a long shot for consideration among the weirdest of all time, but it does offer numerous imaginary sequences, a uniquely cynical perspective, and a scene where the main character complains, “where are all these weird people coming from?”

COMMENTS: Day of the Wacko’s Adas Miauczynski is a comic creation who transcends cultural boundaries. Perpetually annoyed, he strides through Warsaw like a Polish Basil Fawlty, arguing with noisy neighbors, defecating on their lawns, and sending a crippled lapdog flying over a hedge with a swift kick. He’s no role model, but his take-no-guff attitude is perversely appealing; his misbehavior allows the audience to live out a fantasy of taking out their frustrations on annoying urbanites. But while Adas’ antics are vicariously satisfying, the film never loses sight of how utterly miserable the man really is. The first twenty minutes or so show him engaged in his obsessive morning rituals, which involve him washing up and making coffee, always using multiples of seven. He’s the kind of sad sack who, when he finally meets a dream lover in a fantasy sequence, immediately begins worrying about how he’ll be able to get rid of her. And his final monologue as night falls over his apartment block is utterly despairing, tonally inconsistent with the foregoing comedy, and yet somehow not at all out-of-character.

The movie is essentially plotless, showing Adas mucking his way through various social disappointments over the course of a long day. After completing his persnickety ablutions and raging at his noisy neighbors, he gets peeved and walks out of the poetry class he’s teaching; visits his mother, ex-wife, and son, all of whom disappoint him to various degrees; putters about attempting to complete errands; tries to take an afternoon nap just as a wandering minstrel decides to stroll by with an accordion; and decides to take a trip to the beach, where he falls asleep and dreams about death. These adventures are peppered throughout with little fantasy sequences and skits: snippets of the serene-but-constantly-interrupted poem Adas tries vainly to compose, a TV ad for dildos. The satirical material aimed at millennial Polish audiences may go over your head: for example, a scene where various factions tug at a medieval flag, which rips apart and bleeds. The film occasionally looks like it was shot on video, and the fantasy sequences lack visual fireworks, but the imagery isn’t really the thing here: it’s all about Kondrat’s peeved performance, which keeps you watching to see what outrage he will suffer, or commit, next.

Marek Kondrat plays the role of Adas Miauczynski in two other Koterski films, Dom wariatów (1985) and Wszyscy jestesmy Chrystusam (2006). Cezary Pazura played the same character (although named “Adam” instead of “Adas”) in Nothing Funny (1995) and Ajlawju (1999), and at least one other actor has portrayed Miauczynski at a different stage in life. Like Mick Travis in ‘s movies, there is little narrative or stylistic continuity between the various Miauczynskis; Wszyscy jestesmy Chrystusam, for example, seems to be an earnest drama about alcoholism, and in another, the character is described as a film director rather than a teacher. Other than Nothing Funny and Wacko, none of the Miauczynski movies appear to have been translated into English. Wacko is the most universally praised.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A nonstop screwball screed against the multitude of perceived indignities in contempo Poland… sheer chutzpah alone should propel this unique item to brave fests and perhaps a bit of business.”–Eddie Cockrell, Variety (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “haui.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Dzien Swira (Day of the Wacko)

Dzien Swira (Day of the Wacko)
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CAPSULE: STOPMOTION (2023)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Aisling Franciosi, Caoilinn Springall, Tom York, , Therica Wilson-Read

PLOT: Ella struggles to complete her famous stop-motion animator mother’s final work after the woman is hospitalized; she abandons that story and starts another when she meets a creepy little girl who invents a fairy tale about a mysterious man “no one wants to meet.”

Still from STOPMOTION (2023)

COMMENTS: The painstaking nature of stop-motion animation—move a puppet a fraction of a millimeter, snap a picture, repeat for an hour until you’ve animated a full second—means that the form is usually relegated to short films. Just ask or what it takes to animate a full-length feature without a million-dollar team of animators backing you. So it comes as little surprise that celebrated short film stop-animator Robert Morgan decided to craft his debut feature as a hybrid film, a mostly live-action story enveloping small snippets of his animated passion. The subject is, naturally, the making of a stop motion movie, and the focus is on the madness inherent in this most laborious and solitary of artistic pursuits.

The film begins in hybridized fashion, with protagonist Ella (a deranged-looking Franciosi) seen in the flicker of a multicolored party strobe—her facial expressions chopped up into stop-motiony frames. Ella is working on an animated feature about a cute fuzzy cyclops (who foresees his own death) for her ailing (and domineering) mother—the daughter supplies the hands, the mom the imagination. Mom, indeed, calls Ella “puppet” (not “poppet”). When Mom leaves the picture, though, Ella flounders, searching for inspiration, until the arrival of a brunette moppet who might be the spitting image of Ella at eleven. Nightmares and hallucinations ensue as Ella abandons the cyclops story and pursues a new one, with new materials and a growing unhealthy obsessiveness.

Morgan’s animations are obviously the highlight, and they disappoint only in their limited screen time. The girl morbidly encourages Ella to use meat, bone, and mortician’s wax to fashion new puppets, which look like the distressed, putrescent protagonists we’re familiar with from shorts like “Bobby Yeah.” The main puppet’s face is decorated with red blotches, like excema scratched raw, and the boogeyman is covered in bleeding sores and patchy hair. The sound design is oppressive, full of screeches, clanks, thumps, and heavy footsteps. A black, egglike blob and icky procreative imagery feature prominently in the second half. The animated segments, delivered via a fairy tale structure that requires increasingly dreadful visits over the course of three nights, scores a spooky vibe. The violent, gory finale highlights some squirmy visuals, but represents quite the tonal shift away from the dread-based horror of the earlier segments.

In his director’s statement Morgan describes Stopmotion as a “psychological piece in the vein of classic Lynch, or Cronenberg,” and the specific films he cites make it appear like he studied this site’s canon for inspiration: Naked Lunch, Barton Fink, Black Swan, Santa Sangre, Mulholland Drive, INLAND EMPIRE. All of that places the film firmly in our circle of interest. But as a psychological horror, Stopmotion delivers on horror, while coming up a bit short on the psychology. It’s about the madness of creativity, and traffics in concepts like self-doubt, the mystery of inspiration, Eros overcome by Thanatos, and obsession. But, powerful as these themes are, they ultimately don’t synergize in an enticing way. Stopmotion doesn’t add anything new to the portrait of the artist traumatized by their own work; there is no meaty psychological hook for Ella to dangle from. It’s admittedly style over substance, but the surplus of style makes up for a shortfall in substance. Morgan still has room to grow, and if he puts it all together someday, he’s shown the promise to create a masterpiece.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s a disappointing path, more than a bit dimestore Freud, hardly managing to reveal Ella’s fracturing psyche to us in convincing terms, and instead succeeding only in having us assume most of what we’re watching is simply Ella’s confused imagination. In the process, though, you do get a tantalizing primer in how modern stop-motion animation works, and how Morgan’s own physical process musters his greasy weirdness out of everyday substances.”–Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

STOPMOTION [Blu-ray]

STOPMOTION [Blu-ray]
  • Stopmotion [Blu-Ray]
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